


retrofitting the internal landscape and other forms of romance

by TheLongDefeat



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: Canon, F/M, Grissom Conquers San Francisco, Heavy on Sex, Las Vegas is for Lovers, Light on Murder, Post Eps, Pre-Canon, Sara Conquers Grissom
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:08:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 47,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24518974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLongDefeat/pseuds/TheLongDefeat
Summary: "He felt like a rat dropped into a maze with a cocaine salt lick."This story will follow Grissom and Sara's relationship, from San Francisco through Vegas to maybe Costa Rica and who knows, maybe back to Vegas! No casefile, just filling in all the juicy fun/heart-wrenching bits we know that CBS left out.
Relationships: Gil Grissom/Sara Sidle
Comments: 26
Kudos: 34





	1. San Francisco: Part I

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like this story ends up reading like a Chuck Palanhuik knock off was written for a Jane Austen bookclub. Oh well. Not like I'm making any money on it.

In hindsight - although, importantly, he didn’t recognize it immediately - but in hindsight, he knew he had fallen in love with her the moment she made him lose track of time. 

San Francisco was not really Gil Grissom’s kind of city, but then if he thought about it he wasn’t really sure what ‘his kind of city’ was; Las Vegas was where he lived and had no intention of leaving, and it was also the place where lived a few people he might consider important to him, personally or professionally, but Grissom would not say Las Vegas was ‘his kind of city’ or indeed necessarily even ‘home’. San Francisco had none of the recommendations of Las Vegas - meaning it contained nobody important to him, other than the questionable importance of the conference - so it was only a place, and as a place it was full of cars that were not fond of pedestrians, and had the wet and cold weather of London without any of London’s history or charm. The people he had met who lived in San Francisco were, if he were to characterize them as a whole - a habit he tried to avoid - very aware of their own sense of fashion, whereas Gil Grissom was definitively not. They were a tall, beautiful bunch of people, not so different from Grissom’s native turf of LA, but they talked faster, and were willing to pay more for their coffee. 

Of course, Gil Grissom was a scientist, and, on his best days, he hoped, something of a pocket philosopher. He would not judge a whole city filled with a hundred years of history upon his narrow impression of the past day. It was a consistent exercise of Grissom’s life to avoid all unnecessary judgments. Nonetheless, he would be willing to acknowledge he entered his first day of the conference with low expectations of the people he would be meeting there. 

He deemed himself fortunate to be presenting at 9am on the first day; the audience would be neither lean nor over-full, and the attendees would be fresh and interested. It also freed him up for the rest of the conference to enjoy other lectures or take in the city. His talk addressed the symbiotic historical and evolutionary relationship between  _ Homo sapiens  _ and the insect world, and would not provide much technical expertise, so Grissom was hopeful that those who chose to attend would be there on grounds of academic interest and not fulfilling some tedious continuing education unit. The conference board had begged him to present on the specifics of regression timelines with insects, but Grissom had politely and persistently refused, knowing that half his audience would be asleep and it was nothing he found interesting to discuss in detail with laypeople. 

As Grissom opened his messenger bag and leafed through his papers, he considered that he had perhaps underdressed. He noted with some reserve that every man in the room so far - only a handful; it was 8:45am - was wearing a collared shirt and tie. Grissom was in a pale green polo. He felt a small sense of relief as a young woman came running - running! - into the room outfitted in an ill-fitting collegiate t-shirt, denim jeans and a ponytail. 

He couldn’t have known it at the time, of course: the woman was Sara Sidle.

“Sorry,” she gasped, holding up a hand to pre-emptively deflect any questions, “I’m late.”

Grissom felt a brief, irrational bolt of alarm and so checked his watch. 8:46am. “The lecture begins at 9am, miss.”

The girl looked up at him. She was young; not younger than many new CSIs, not even younger than many at the conference, but she wore her youth in a way most people in the profession did not; she gave no impression of trying to seem older; her face was pale and open and glowed with sincerity as she replied, “I always arrive fifteen minutes early.”

Grissom had nothing to say to this. Inwardly, he reflected,  _ Odd.  _

The lecture proceeded rather well, if he might say so himself; people seemed interested, scribbling notes and nodding gravely along, only one person leaving to use the restroom. The early-girl did not write any notes, but she stared at him fixedly, not smiling, as though she was memorizing every word he spoke, which was slightly unsettling when he caught her eye but, he hoped, a good sign of her interest in the material. At length he advised the small congregation that they should pair up for an exercise consisting of naming examples of ways in which insects have proved to be essential and beneficial to human life. Grissom had already noted that the room contained an odd number of students, and considered only for an instant having a group of three but instead looked down at early-girl and gave a slight tilt of his head to indicate she would be paired with him. It seemed less awkward to choose her considering they had already exchanged a few words, and, if he were being particularly honest, something about her manner had charmed him.

And she was very pretty.

She came up to his podium slowly, like she was approaching a priest for a sacrament, and Grissom tried to look friendly and non-threatening. “Alright,” she said, setting her bag down by his feet, “we both know you don’t need to list examples, and I could list fifteen off the top of my head, so do you mind if I use this time to ask you some questions?”

Perhaps he was looking a little too non-threatening. “There will be time for questions at the end of the talk,” he replied, glancing out over the many busy couples. He narrowed his eyes as he looked back at the girl. “Fifteen? Give me three examples.”

One of her eyebrows crept upward, as though to say,  _ Is this really how you want to spend your valuable time?  _ “Silkworms,” she replied instantly, “scarabs in ancient Egypt. And insects as agents of horror in modern cinema.”

Good answers. God, she was bright. “Dare I ask for the other twelve?”

Her lips pressed together. Her face was so pale she had no defense from the spots of color rising in her cheeks. “I may have exaggerated.”

She had not yet looked away from him since setting down her bag. There was an intensity to her regard that was making him feel a little unbalanced, and he inwardly thanked divine providence that  _ he _ was not one to blush. “Three questions for three answers.”

“Do you think the common fear of insects is primarily cultural, or an evolutionary instinct to avoid venomous bites and stings? Do you think insects as a whole have benefited from human activities? And -” here she paused, her eyes finally, finally shifting away from his to stare up at the ceiling - “why do people kill each other?”

He wouldn’t say she was the most interesting person he’d ever met; she wasn’t. And anyways in that moment he didn’t have the time or desire to analyze the impression of this girl relative to the many, many other people he had encountered in his forty years of life. In that moment, he was busy noticing that his tongue was a little dry, and he needed a sip from his reusable water bottle. “All three of those questions merit more attention than I could give them right now. Why don’t we--?”

She cut him off. “What are you doing after this?”

Grissom bought himself a moment sipping his water. He could use this time to come up with an excuse for why he can’t see her outside of seminar. “Whatever you want to do.” He  _ could  _ use the time that way, but he didn’t want to.

She pressed her lips again, but the motion was futile; a smile bloomed across her face, and the spots of color were back in her cheeks. “Lunch?”

“It’s a date.” She returned to her seat.

Grissom cleared his throat to call attention from the other pairs. People raised their hands to volunteer their answers, and a lively discussion commenced; he was pleased that not all the answers were ones he’d heard more than three times before. There was even an ichthyologist in the middle row who offered very unique insights. The remainder of the talk went well.

_ Why do people kill each other? _ __  
  


Grissom thanked the class and smiled politely at the smattering of applause. Early-girl, who was now categorized in his mental registrar as lunch-girl, waited in her seat expectantly, staring at him, not bothering to stand and approach or offer any social nicety indicating that she was doing anything other than anticipating urgently his accompanying her to lunch. 

Grissom trotted the three steps separating his speaking platform from the audience, letting the side of his mouth drag up in the smile he had been resisting these last three hours. “Where to?”

She didn’t respond right away; she was blinking up at him with a serious expression on her face. Grissom was aware on some deep, indefinable level that she was very attracted to him.

Generally, Grissom found the behavior of his fellow human beings perplexing at best and, more often, deliberately nonsensical; all the little codes and nuances they spent so much time participating in and deciphering seemed utterly superfluous to him, a man who preferred solitude when outside strict and predictable frameworks of professional relationships. He was not disabled in this regard - he could understand the subtleties of human social communication as needed for his work and other worthy pursuits - but he liked to think of his brain as differently prioritized. Comprehending all the multifarious motivations and implications of people’s interactions did not usually warrant its cost of neural synaptic energy. 

In the case of lunch-girl, it seemed an exception had been made.

It wasn’t voluntary; Grissom had not picked her out in the preceding three hours and said, this girl, this one right here, I will commit to understanding on every level I can access her. In later reflections, he would observe that it was not so different from how he had come to study insects - he had not chosen them, per se, as the object of fascination; he had been, in that sense, a passive recipient; he had simply been fascinated.

And he was being fascinated again. 

“There’s an Ike’s sandwiches just around the corner.” As she stooped to collect her bag, some of her hair came loose from her ponytail, falling in a loose curl on the graceful slope of her cheekbone. For some reason it made him notice very distinctly how large and dark her eyes were. 

“Sandwiches sound great.” Neither Grissom nor lunch-girl moved. “What’s your name?”

She smiled again - and again, she pursed her lips to fight it - raising one hand to tap a finger to the square of sticky paper adhered to her blouse across her right breast.

Grissom followed the line of her finger - an hardwired social response to joint attention indicators - and read her name, written in sprawling all capital letters,  _ SARA SIDLE,  _ and made an effort not to notice the shape and size of the breast beneath it, though failing utterly on that second count. It was, of course, on some unconscious level, the reason he had omitted her name tag from his awareness; now that his subliminal ignorance was dispelled, he felt in a rush what he had not been feeling the past three hours: he was very attracted to her. “Sara.”

She nodded once, pertly. “Dr. Grissom.”

“No need for the title,” he replied politely, slinging his messenger bag over his shoulder. He noticed with a muted sense of horror that his fingers were faintly trembling, an indicator of excessive adrenaline response that was increasing the rate of muscular synapse in preparation for sudden physical exertion. In the case of fear, that exertion might be to run; in this case, he knew, it was something else entirely. 

She walked alongside him in a long, almost loping stride, her fingers picking at the strap of her bag, her eyes scanning continuously through the crowd of conference goers as she directed him expertly towards the rear entrance of the center. The conference was being held at the San Francisco State University student center, and Grissom did not know the campus at all; Sara seemed to know it well.

“Where did you go to school?”

“Harvard,” she replied absently. Grissom appreciated this immediately - it was exceedingly rare, in his experience, to hear somebody pronounce their attendance at an ivy league without either barely constrained superiority or a sort of cringing awkwardness that seemed to say,  _ I’m as sorry as you are to discover how inferior you are.  _ But Sara - who was always fifteen minutes early, who asked too many questions, who wore her hair in a loose ponytail - stated it only as a matter of record. 

“And grad school?”

“Berkeley.” Sara pushed open the double doors leading out to the courtyard, not giving him a chance to open it for her. “You’re a senior criminologist in Las Vegas.” She looked at him scrutinizingly. “And a nationally renowned entomologist.”

He tilted his head towards her, hiked an eyebrow. “Been doing your research.”

“I read your bio during the break in lecture. It was very praising.”

He laughed. “Well, what do you think? Do I live up to the hype?”

She stopped abruptly; as though connected by some invisible thread, he stopped nearly at the same moment. Her eyes scoured his face for a moment. The slow, unfurling grin she gave him made his cock twitch; he tensed his abdominal muscles, fighting it. “That remains to be seen.”

~*~

The lunch was - well - he couldn’t quite settle on the appropriate adjectives, either at the time or later, much later, when that day looped through his mind ceaselessly as one episode in a saga of Sara Sidle that kept him awake through the long hot hours of Las Vegas summer days. He might attempt to say that the lunch was good, of course, and it was good, very good, but good was so broad as to be almost useless; electric would be another word, but that seemed too dramatic, and he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t adding significance in hindsight. So suffice to say that he left the lunch determined to see Sara Sidle again.

He had planned, at the end point of parting, to ask her for her telephone number; he had been contemplating the question since somewhere between her ordering a sandwich and water with no ice and her informing him that she had left behind the world of physics because she realized that in spite of universe’s best efforts nothing could seem to dissuade her faith in humanity and sincere belief that wrongs could be righted and people could be helped. How to ask, though? And under what pretense? Was he asking in order to pursue her romantically? Not necessarily - or at least not precisely - he didn’t want to date her - he had no intention of forming some kind of lasting connection outside a professional relationship. On the other hand, his interest in her surpassed the professional, and he wanted to see her again, and he would probably want that ‘again’ to be a dinner and he would definitely want to pay.

He vacillated inwardly for the next hour of lunch, and it was only as they walked slowly back towards campus in the foggy mist of San Francisco in late March that he finally determined he would ask, and he would specify that he was asking in order to arrange a dinner to ‘further discuss her interest in entomological anthropology’. As he turned to her in order to do so, she said:

“I’d like to go on a date with you. Give me the number of your hotel?”

He stopped, processing this unexpected move, feeling rather like a chess player whose complex game strategy has been thrown by the opponent’s queen attacking his pawn. “Um. Sure.”

She looked at him, seeming uneasy. “Do you want to go on a date with me?”

Grissom felt unsure: what did she mean by date? What was he agreeing to? “I’d like to get dinner.”

She seemed satisfied. “Okay. Write the number on my arm - here’s a pen - and I’ll call you sometime tonight.”

He held the sharpie over her slender, milk-white arm, his eyes tracing the bluish veins that extended like beautiful, multi-colored spider webs up from her wrist, and realized he would need to hold her hand in order to stabilize her arm to write on it. He did so. Her skin was warm. He wrote the number and returned the pen to her. “I look forward to your call.”

She smiled, her expression saying,  _ of course you do,  _ and left without saying goodbye.

~*~

That night he found himself sitting on his hotel bed, legs crossed at the ankles, not reading. His journal was open and his glasses were on and, if one cared to observe, his eyes were moving occasionally over the glossy expanse of the page, but he was not reading.

Catherine had paged him and he’d called her and she said that Brass was having a cow because a body had been released before they’d had a chance to collect trace evidence. Grissom heard Lindsay wailing in the background and a sharp reprimand from Eddy. Catherine sighed and Grissom heard a door shut quietly. “How are you? How’s Cali?”

Cali - one of those terms native Californians disparage. Grissom shrugged and remembered she couldn’t see it. “It’s fine.”

“Meet any cute girls?”

He tapped his index finger against his thumb, now glad she couldn’t see him. “The lectures have been interesting. And my talk went well.”

“You’re done already? Why don’t you fly back?”

“I agreed to get dinner with a colleague.”

Catherine hummed, clearly unconvinced. “Well, don’t even think of abandoning us for all those ocean waves and hippies,” she warned.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said.

They said their goodbyes and Grissom leaned his head against the hard composite wood of the bedframe and thought. He had known Catherine for nearly ten years, before she was married, before she even knew Eddy. She was kind and good-looking and dreadfully clever, and she seemed to understand the world in a way he did not but never resented him for his ignorance. She respected him and looked out for him and, he was moderately confident, loved him. 

He wondered why he never fell in love with women like Catherine.

It was a maudlin thought, and a bit navel-gazing, but meeting Sara Sidle had put him in that mood. Sara Sidle, who was young and little odd and probably as single-minded as he was; Sara Sidle, who seemed slightly impulsive and maybe a bit reckless. Sara Sidle, who made his fingers shake.

The phone rang. Grissom waited another five seconds before answering. “Grissom.”

“Hey,” she said, not giving her name, and he was beginning to memorize her unusual vocal cadence - where was she from, anyway? “How about tomorrow at 6pm? I’ll pick you up.”

She rattled it off like she was his supervisor assigning him a case. He found it very charming in spite of himself. “6pm is great. I agreed to meet for a drink here at the hotel with a UCSF professor at 9pm, so the timing is good.”

“Where do you want to eat? We could do the city, but Oakland is cool.”

“Wherever you want; I trust your expertise.”

“Mm,” she hummed, and the sound spread like fracture lines from his ear up over his scalp and pricklingly down the back of his neck. “I’m glad you trust me. I’ll take good care of you.”

There was something sultry in the way she said it, and Grissom realized he should not have taken the call in bed with his shirt off and his head propped on the bed frame, but it was too late; he was already hard. “I’m getting that sense,” he said, then wondered if that was an odd thing to say.

He could feel her smile glowing through the receiver. “Alright. See you tomorrow.” She hung up without saying goodbye.

Grissom picked up the psychology journal he’d left bookmarked on the bedside table, and opened it to an article he’d set aside for later about callous-unemotional traits in children and how they persisted into adulthood. It was fascinating stuff, really, or at least he supposed it was; he hadn’t read a word. His eyes moved unseeingly across the black ink.

His mind, meanwhile, somersaulted liquidly through many scenarios: on her knees in front of the podium, here on the bleached linens of his hotel bed, in her car tomorrow evening (he imagined, for some reason he could not begin to guess, that she drove a Mazda). His cock throbbed beneath his slacks and boxer briefs, a pleasant ache that made him tense the muscles of his legs without meaning to. It felt very wrong to masturbate to thoughts of Sara Sidle - though he wanted to very badly. And the more he wanted to, the more wrong it felt.

At moments like these Grissom deeply regretted being raised Catholic.

He pretended to read for a full fifteen more minutes before tossing the journal and unbuttoning his pants with jerky, angry movements, like he was being made to do something against his will. It was not as though it was an unusual behavior for him, or even that he didn’t usually fantasize; but the fantasies were typically more distant, of past lovers or women he had no intention of pursuing. Now, though, it felt too real, too possible, like he was imagining something that might actually come to pass, but shouldn’t. She was young and she was a professional colleague and he had nothing, really, to offer her. 

He came faster and harder than he expected, ejaculating all over his hand and pants, not grabbing a tissue in time or even squeezing the head of his penis to keep from making a mess. He wiped himself up and ran the slacks under cold water in the bathroom sink to avoid a stain. 

Grissom lay down on the bed, a little chilled in the dry air conditioned hotel room. His last thought before falling asleep was her question:

_ Why do people kill each other? _

~*~

She drove furiously through the city, her palm perpetually hovering over the horn, her eyes moving with clinical precision through the jagged lines of cars: a predator searching out weakness in the herd. Grissom gripped the passenger door handle and felt a little nauseous, but it wasn’t that different from riding a rollercoaster except he didn’t know whether he would survive and he spent the whole time staring at a beautiful woman.

They arrived at a restaurant called the Fat Lady, over the bridge in Oakland. Grissom observed the scrawling graffiti and the empty shipping containers stacking up in yards. The gritty industrialism was a shocking change from San Francisco’s glossy disarray, but Grissom enjoyed it, maybe mostly because of her: she was talking as she drove, pointing out different places she’d done cases and all the fascinating ways people’s lives had ended throughout the area, sprinkling in personal anecdotes of things she’d seen and felt and thought. 

She snaked into a parking spot a block from the restaurant and then swung towards the backseat to pull out a club. After securing her vehicle, she flashed a gap-toothed grin at him, leaping out of the car and halfway to the restaurant before he’d collected his wits enough to unbuckle his seatbelt.

_ She  _ was the rollercoaster, and he didn’t want to get off.

The restaurant was smoky and dark and everything was made of smooth lacquered wood or faux velvet. At dinner he ordered a steak and a glass of wine - Vegas had left its imprint after all - and she ordered a plate of raw oysters, and he was amazed to find his own hand reaching over the table and stealing one, that slippery saltwater taste of the deep ocean coating his throat, Sara watching his tongue like she’d be tested on it later. She told him stories of physics and Harvard and her first time sky-diving, and he mentioned the time he’d tossed a dummy off a roof to simulate a fall in Minnesota and accidentally clipped the director of the crime lab as the man was sneaking out back for a smoke. She laughed, if laugh it be called; wild and cackling, the sound sizzling along his skin, up his forearms and over his biceps and curling into his ears like smoke. 

Her favorite activity in the lab was analyzing trace materials; sometimes she kept photos of crime scenes she took for her personal collection; she had had sex once with a coronor’s assistant on a table in the morgue. He hated that he had to kill insects in order to analyze them; he loved to teach almost as much as he loved to work cases; a woman once called him asking for a date even though she was the prime suspect in an active murder investigation. 

“What did you say?” Sara asked, her eyes wide, her cheeks glowing from her pint of Guinness. 

“I said no,” he replied, flippant, not aware of himself tilting his head in the way Catherine always said made him look like a beagle waiting for a biscuit. 

Sara pressed her lips as she smiled and looked at him in a way that made the back of his tongue ache. “You think you’re cute.”

He leaned back against his chair, feeling himself grinning, feeling himself dissolving a little at the edges, a painting with wet paint, “am I?”

She laughed again, her hair curling and tumbling around her shoulders. “Guess I’m just glad I’m not a murder suspect,” she said.

Grissom touched his fingers to his lips, leaned against his palm. “I don’t know if I could have said no to you.”

The words swelled in her eyes for a moment, but only a moment; then she was jerking upright like she’d been electrocuted. “Shit,” she said, “oh, shit - did you say you had something at nine?”

Grissom followed her eyes and swivelled around to see a dimly lit clock behind the bar. 9:39pm. 

The fact of his lateness hit him with the speed and unbalancing shock of a rear end collision. In all his adult life, Grissom had been late only a handful of times, each one with a verifiable and unavoidable excuse; he could have written out every scenario by hand, right now on this restaurant napkin if need be. Punctuality for him was a religious observance, a vertebrae in the spinal column of his existence. It was not merely a matter of moral grandstanding; it was a fundamental aspect of how his neurology functioned. An awareness of time was ingrained in his consciousness in the same way that an awareness of his own location in material space was; it was an essential piece of his identity as a scholar and scientist and an investigator; he was as likely to forget the hour as he was to forget that he had feet. 

The terror of this oversight washed over him, cold and shocking as the pacific ocean smashing into the cliff faces only a few miles away. It was like he had been drugged, and he knew of course the intoxicant in this case was sitting across from him, chewing nervously at her lip. It was not her fault - he knew that - he wasn’t a neanderthal. But it was unacceptable. 

It was the first time Sara Sidle left him speechless. 

“I…” he said, staring at the clock, struggling with the irrefutable evidence of it against the previously unquestioned theory of his knowing his own mind, “I…”

Sara sighed, giving him a look of deep understanding that felt very real. “You lost track of time.”

~*~

There was no point in his trying to get back to the professor; he did not even attempt it. Instead he used the bar phone to call the hotel and ask that they convey his sincerest apologies. It took some of the dizzying whirlwind out of the evening, but he found, as he returned to the table and Sara Sidle, that he did not want to say goodnight.

Reading his mind, Sara said, “let’s get out of here. Want to head back to mine? My roommate’s out for the night.”

The offer was clear, as those things went; Grissom knew immediately he should decline. He was not the type to have sex with a woman he’d only just met, and he was not the type to have sex with a colleague, and he suspected - though it was the first ever occurrence, so he couldn’t be sure - he was not the type to have sex with a woman who turned him inside out the way Sara had. “That sounds nice,” he said, “but it’s been a long day.”

He pulled out bills to pay for the dinner. She frowned at him, trying not to look hurt and failing. “Oh.”

He felt her sadness like she was a radio wave and he was an antenna. What was this woman doing to him? “I could stop by for a little while, I guess,” he amended.

Her apartment was small and cluttered but clean; he saw a poster of the atom tacked on the wall above the couch, and next to it a poster for  _ Reservoir Dogs _ . Sara kicked off her shoes and peeled off her sweater upon entry, revealing the long arms and slender body he had imagined as he jerked himself off yesterday night. 

“Want a drink?”

“Whatever you’re having.” Grissom picked his way cautiously to the couch but did not sit. The apartment was young, frighteningly young, frenetic and full. He felt like a rat dropped into a maze with a cocaine salt lick. 

Sara came up behind him with two gin and tonics, and as he sipped his with both hands she smoothed her palms down his shoulders and then up his chest. His heart pulsed in his ribs with such force he thought he might have an arrythmia. He set his drink on the bookshelf.

Forcing himself to look at her, he felt very distinctly the moment when his composure failed him; she was gazing up, not with avid hunger, as he might have suspected, but an open, curious longing that made him feel  _ delicious.  _

In the next half of a half of a second, his right hand was tangled in her hair, his left hand skating down her narrow waist, and he kissed her, her lips cold from the drink and slippery and the best thing he’d tasted in a month - a year - his whole life. She made a little sound of surprise and breathy enjoyment that shot straight to his cock, now straining against his pants. Her fingers curled at the hair on the back of his neck, scratching slightly at his scalp, another sensation that went rocketing through his nervous system, her other hand resting chastely on his shoulder.

They kissed a long time, and he wondered if maybe that was all they would do; she was making no move to proceed, and he wasn’t really sure he should, though his thumb was brushing the underside of her breast and he was 95% certain she wasn’t wearing a bra. He would be happy with the kissing. He  _ was  _ happy with the kissing. 

She finally stepped forward, letting the long cool streak of her body align against his, her breasts pressing lightly to his chest, her thigh brushing maddeningly against his erection. He didn’t thrust, instead leaning back from the kiss to bite lightly at her jaw and say, “tell me what you want.”

The front door opened.

Grissom sprange back from Sara Sidle like he was a finger and she was a hot skillet. Turning to the door, he saw an asian woman about Sara’s age wearing an SFPD jacket and a smile. “Oops,” the woman said through her grin.

Sara flushed, grabbing Grissom’s hand and yanking him down the hall. “Thanks for the warning, Chelsea!” she called back irritably. She shoved him into a tiny bedroom and closed and locked the door. “I’m so sorry about that.”

Grissom instinctively acquainted himself with the space - no bedframe, just a mattress on the floor; one small window with three plants on the sill; a painting easel; two bookshelves packed with books. “I - I can’t have sex with you while your roommate is home,” he said desperately.

Sara only arched a brow. “Okay,” she said, deceptively calm. She stepped forward and trailed one hand from his collarbone to his belt buckle, the muscles of his abdomen seizing as she snaked her long fingers under his waistband. “That’s fine. Why don’t I just get you off with my mouth?”

Grissom felt brittle, like glass cooled too quickly; his arousal was a maelstrom inside of him, a hurricane, and then so was his fear, his sense of overwhelm. “I… we…”

She sighed sharply, pulling her hand back. “You’re right,” she said. “We should’ve gone to your hotel.” She pressed a light kiss to the edge of his mouth. “Why don’t we try again tomorrow?”

Grissom was leaving tomorrow. He told her so. Sara didn’t answer, only dropping her head against his shoulder. 

Grissom wrapped his arms around her and fastened her against his body. She was cool and slight and felt wonderful against him. He cupped one hand on the back of her head, his thumb swiping against her mastoid bone, noticing she smelled like fingerprint powder and sweat and that musky scent of an aroused woman that was almost a taste. He pressed a kiss to her hair like she was somebody he loved. 

“Next time I’m in town,” he found himself saying, “I want to see you, okay?”

She nodded into his collarbone. Leading him to the front entrance, she kissed him again, licking his teeth, and then closed the door without saying goodbye. 

~*~

That night, after he got into the hotel room and locked the door and came into his fist - this time with a tissue at the ready - he let his mind reel dizzyingly over the events of the day. On the plane the next morning to Vegas, he kept thinking of the question she asked that he hadn’t been able to answer:

Why do people kill each other?

~*~


	2. San Francisco Part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I imagine Sara as an emotive, sort of surreal perspective, dark at times but also very joyful when called for, a juxtaposition from Grissom's verbose but clinically cold way of looking at the world. They have the same undercurrents of tenderness and strong feeling, but they process their tendencies in opposite ways. 
> 
> Also, I actually googled what exhibitions were at the De Young in 1998, because I'm a nerd.

~*~

SAN FRANCISCO PART TWO

~*~

When she dreams of him, he is always alive.

There is mud in her hair, a smell on her hands she has no name for. She touches the darkness of the house with her fingertips, and it is cool, a little wet. In the foyer, she sees his shoulders, hunched, and his long shadow reaches her toes.

“I thought you were dead,” she says. He is still so much taller than her.

In the back of the house, the tank is full of dead and dying fish. She doesn’t remember whether they had a couch back there but she does remember which floorboard squeaked with her step and she avoids it, toeing along the edge of the room like it is a crime scene. She watches the fish, sees the few survivors eating leisurely on the floating upside down carcasses of their children. 

She hears him calling her name. He is in the kitchen, leaning on his arms crossed on the white tile counter. He doesn’t look at her, and she can’t remember what it felt like, to have his gaze focused on her face. Maybe she never knew. “You’re dead,” she says again, because she knows that she used to know that, a distant memory that slips through her fingers.

“No,” he says. “You just never looked for me.”

Sara unscrews the bottle, uses the shot glass to measure out his drink. He sips it slowly - he was never a fast drinker. “I live somewhere else, now,” she says. The smell of the alcohol burns at her throat - no, they’re not tears - 

“Sara,” he says, in that same voice she thought she had forgotten. “Sara, you’ve never left this house.”

~*~

_San Francisco. Sara’s apartment._

She is remembering how he’s different from the other guys she’s been with - he’s kind of a quiet person, but there’s an intensity to him that makes her skin prickle when he’s near, makes the hairs on her arms stand up. The palm that is smoothing from her shoulder down her arm is slow, warm. He moves deliberately and gently, undressing her with the same thoughtfulness a person might have as they move chess pieces on a board. 

She doesn’t usually talk during sex, so maybe it’s because he’s so quiet himself but for some reason around him she can’t seem to shut up. “We could go to golden gate park tomorrow, if you want. Since you said you haven’t, um, done the tourist thing.”

Grissom’s eyes flick up to meet hers, cool and blue and maybe a little bit amused. “That sounds nice.”

It’s a relief to hear him speak. Sara steps into his space, emboldened; he tilts his chin down so their noses are brushing. Sara unbuttons the button at the throat of his shirt. “I read that book you recommended. By Phillip Gerard.”

This close, she can’t really see his expression. He tilts his head a little, and she sees the edge of his barely-there smile. He brushes his fingertips against her cheek, her jaw. Sara represses a shiver, feeling like her nerve-endings are reaching out for his light touch. “What’d you think?” He is so close that his breath blooms warmly against her lips. She can almost taste him. 

“It was good,” she says, in a smaller voice than she intends. 

Grissom kisses her the same way he had sipped the wine he’d ordered for dinner - slowly, attentively, and with relish. 

Sara works through his buttons as he kisses her, then reaches up to rake her fingers through his hair as she opens her lips against his. His hair is so curly her fingers get a little stuck; she forgets this momentary distraction as his tongue slides fleetingly against her lower lip. 

She scratches her nails lightly against his scalp, and the little huff of pleasure against her lips that he makes almost has her crowing in triumph. Every breath is a love confession in this soft Grissom-language of sighs and glances. 

She pushes his shirt open and runs her hands down his body. He’s got a little hair on his chest, and he’s lean, not sculpted - not an athlete, but deliciously warm under her palms. The muscles of his abdomen tense as she brushes her thumbs against his belt buckle. 

He backs her up two steps, parting from her mouth, his hands loosely holding her by the biceps. The backs of her knees hit the mattress, and she lowers herself down, taking advantage of the moment to look up at him, his shirt flared open, his hair sticking up at angles.

“Your face is very symmetrical,” she says.

It’s a stupid thing to say. Sara feels herself frowning - why did she have to say anything? - and Grissom pauses, looking at her with an expression of surprise, one knee on the mattress by her hip, ready to lay down over her. He cocks his head. “Mammals look for symmetry in a mate,” he replies, with some interest.

Sara exhales silently. He is an odd one - almost as odd as her. She smiles, and wipes her hand over her mouth to hide it. “I guess it all comes down to animal instincts.”

“Mm,” he hums low, his gaze wandering down her body in a way that makes her feel a little dizzy. He lowers himself alongside her, not over her, and studies her face with a smile she can’t quite interpret.

She pulls him by the shoulder up over her, and he rolls forward obligingly, a long hot streak against her body, his belt buckle chafing a little against the soft skin of her belly, his thighs warm as they bracket hers, the flare of his ribs against her chest with his breath as he pauses in kissing her to nibble at her jaw and neck. She can’t help the little sound she makes as his teeth and tongue graze her pulse point, and she’s rewarded as he flexes his hips forward instinctively and she feels his erection against her hip. 

“Did you know the neck is more sensitive to light touch among people with low body fat?” she asks, breathless, one of her hands ruffling the soft hairs at the base of his skull, the other rubbing down his back.

He laughs into her collarbone, a startled, joyful sound. He leans up on his elbows to look down at her, and he is grinning, and she can see his teeth are a little crooked, and he is so gorgeous she feels like she can’t bear it. 

“I didn’t know that,” he says, and as he says it he looks at Sara like she is the best thing he’s seen in a long, long time.

~*~

He had looked as amazed as she felt afterwards, catching his breath, small beads of sweat drying in the shallow dip below his collarbone and above the swell of pectoral muscle. She got the sense he was not the type to take home a lot of girls.

Except it was she who had taken him home, of course. 

Sara crosses towards the bathroom, wondering if it’s awkward that she’s naked but wanting to imitate the unabashed confidence women in the movies always have as they strut around after lovemaking. She can feel his cool eyes slipping down the curves of her body, and it makes her glad to know he’s still looking at her even after he’s gotten what he wanted.

Assuming he did get what he wanted. 

She comes out of the bathroom to find him sitting up in her bed, the sheets pooled in his lap, his hair sticking up at angles and his ears a little pink. He looks vulnerable, uncertain, and she forgets that he is probably ten or fifteen years older than her, forgets she met him as he taught a seminar she attended and he called on her like a schoolgirl. 

She worries for the first time that she may be getting in over her head.

“Do you want some water?”

He nods, and when she comes back from the kitchen he’s holding his boxers like he isn’t sure if they’re safe to wear, and she realizes he wants to get dressed but doesn’t want to be rude since she isn’t, so she pulls on her underwear and an oversized t shirt from her pajama drawer. 

She invites him to come into her living room, picking up the books that are covering her couch. He has put on his snug fitting jeans that show off his ass and his narrow waist. He isn’t an athlete, not sculpted or tanned, but his body is lean and strong in that way that some men just are without ever trying. There’s a little hair on his chest, enough that it had scraped her tongue as she’d licked his nipple and felt his short, stuttering breaths against the crown of her head. 

Grissom is leafing through a copy of Cosmo magazine. “My roommate,” Sara justifies, pulling her hair up into a ponytail. He skims an article with some interest. 

Sara sits down on the couch, leaning back against the arm. Grissom folds himself next to her, graceful conservative movements like he is made of origami. He picks up her feet with his warm hands and pulls them onto his lap. 

She is embarrassed to find she’s getting wet again as he rubs his fingers into the soles of her feet, so she says, “What’s Vegas like?” to distract herself, running her hands anxiously along the hem of her t-shirt.

When she glances back at him she sees his eyes following her movements, cooler blue than a glass of water. “Hot. Dry. Best lab in the country. And I’m never bored.” His palm glides up her calf, and the feel of his hand against the back of her knee makes her shiver.

“At first you didn’t seem like a Vegas guy to me. But now I’m thinking you’re one of those people who sees more in a city than the city wants you to see.” Grissom arches a brow at her, his thumb sweeping up the back of her thigh. “I wasn’t one of those kids who travelled to Europe after high school. Or college. No money. But I went on a road trip all through the states after high school. Camping mostly, some shady hotels. And I found that no place was exactly what it wanted to be. Cities are like people. They all have secrets and awkward memories they’d rather forget.”

Grissom leans back against the couch, his head resting against the pillow. She sees the shadow of his beard growing in, the undulation of his adam’s apple. “ ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.’ ”

Sara smiles and stretches her feet slightly, rubbing them against his leg, carefully avoiding the ridge of denim where she can see he’s getting hard again. “Michel Proust.”

A smile flickers at the edge of his lips like a match flame. “Very good. Who was with you on your trip?”

Sara shakes her head once. “Nobody. I spent a lot of my time growing up in noisy houses packed with people. I needed some space to myself.”

“The house I grew up in was silent,” Grissom says. “But I still find myself longing for time away from the noise of the world.”

Sara is not really a sexually experienced person, and she wouldn’t say the experience she did have lent her any credibility in terms of prowess, but something about him makes her feel bold, so she sweeps her right foot forward and drags it very lightly over the crotch of his jeans. She watches greedily as the sensation passes through his body: his ribs flaring out with his deep inhale, the minute tremor in his lower lip, the slow blink. “I studied physics at Harvard. I loved learning about the forces that ordered the world. Everything was explainable. Consistent. Even the most terrifying forces of chaos and entropy have an internal logic to them. It helped me feel like the world was a place that could make sense, that wasn’t just random and meaningless.”

Grissom shifts slightly towards her. The sun is starting to set, and his face is cast in shadow and low light. He is gorgeous. “And then you left physics to study the science of criminalistics.”

Sara ducks her head, smiling. “I thought for a long time that I was trying to restore my faith in humanity. And then when I graduated Harvard and started working odd jobs I had a lot of time to think. I realized I’d never lost my faith in humanity.” She looks up at the man she’s just made love to, will probably be making love to again. He’s watching her the way she’s seen people study paintings in a museum, like they’ve just been struck in the heart by beauty, like a thousand brush strokes have just come to life before their eyes. “People are ugly and horrible. But they’re also kind and heartbroken and capable of incredible good.”

He opens his mouth to reply and then closes it. He leans forward on his knee to seal his lips against hers.

~*~

“I don’t know if I want to be a CSI,” she says, sprawled on the ground, the grass itching her shoulder blades. The sun above is milky and warm as it leans against the bare skin of her arms and shoulders and legs. She is tired, glad to be resting; they’d spent four hours in the De Young museum, wandering the halls, fingers brushing but never interlocking, as Grissom quietly told her this or that about the art, a collection of odd facts like marbles in a jar. He didn’t know much about the African art, but that section was still - had always been - her favorite; she loved its sculptures and objects and textures, the depth of the work; so much more compelling than prints and canvas. Sara Sidle had always been suspicious of things that exist in only two dimensions. 

Grissom is sitting propped against a eucalyptus tree, leafing through a book he’d bought in the gift store about Charles Jones, the photographer whose work was being exhibited. It had been dozens of photos of plants and vegetables, angular and dark, their tuberous bodies looking more graphic, somehow, than any of the corpses Sara had dissected through the Coroner's Office. Precisely the kind of thing to enthrall Grissom. She had pursed her lips at his purchase, and he’d asked as he prepared to check out if she didn’t like the subject matter - she’d replied that she loved plants that were alive, and found that killing them to preserve their beauty was a sad and too-human practice.

“You like vegetation,” he’d replied in a mumble, peering closely at a puzzle for sale that had 5,000 pieces and a picture of a butterfly on the front. 

“That’s a way to put it,” she’d allowed.

Now, together in the dim light of the afternoon, her mind wandered to other tracks. She’d been doing very well since graduation in her position as a CSI Level 1 with the San Francisco Crime Lab; her supervisor had praised her intellect and work ethic on more than one occasion. When she mentioned knowing Grissom - it had only been a slip; she had not intended to name-drop - her supervisor had glowed with silent admiration. 

“What doubts are you having?” Grissom asks, narrowing his eyebrows as he reads some particularly interesting insight about a black and white photo of stacked carrots. 

Sara turns her head to look at him fully, squinting even though the light is pale and clouds tangle up together overhead. “It feels a little pointless, sometimes. There’s no respect for us from the sheriff or detectives, at least in this city. And so many cases go unsolved. Even the ones that are solved - does prison really redeem anybody? Is that justice? What exactly am I working towards?”

Grissom’s eyes glide off the page of his book, drifting into the middle distance of the park, shifting without traction from redwood to eucalyptus to the snaking road that bisected the artificial oasis of nature. “Maybe it isn’t about justice,” he replies, cocking his head in that way of his, one shoulder bouncing up and down in a thoughtful shrug. “Maybe it’s about truth. About giving a voice to people who are otherwise rendered voiceless. So, whatever happens after the story is told - that’s the courts and the lawyers. We are just assembling the facts and letting people’s stories be told.”

Sara rolls onto her stomach, propping herself on her elbows. Grissom doesn’t quite look at her, but she knows he is watching her, knows with a certainty that has no words that there is nothing else but her, in this moment, that matters to him. “Stories are powerful,” she says.

His eyes do creep up to settle against hers, and she finds something radiating there, in this distance between them; some kind of feeling she can’t name, a tension, maybe, or a terror. “Yes,” he agrees.

Sara pushes up onto her hands and knees and crawls towards him slowly, giving him time to react, to reject her advance. He doesn’t. His book is still open against his thigh, utterly forgotten. She reaches him and sits on her heels, sweeping the backs of her fingers from his temple to his lips. “So what is the story we’re telling, Grissom?”

He shifts his jaw, and she thinks maybe he is licking his teeth, a thinking gesture. His fingers tremble very slightly as he takes her wrist and pulls her away. “Sara,” he reprimands in that funny, sort of tinny voice he has, neither deep nor high, the sound of a person speaking over an old-fashioned telephone, “some stories don’t need to be told.” He tugs her arm until she dips forward, and he soothes his hard words with soft kisses.

~*~

Sara starts work at 4pm, tired from a long day with Grissom and strange dreams the night before. She leaves her guest in his hotel room, his shirt unbuttoned, his glasses perched on his nose. She’ll find him again when she’s through. 

She’s assigned a 419 in the tenderloin. A whip-thin man with shocking bleached white hair and pale brown eyes staring long into nothing. A probable overdose. Sara crouches beside him, sensing the coolness of his skin, the stillness. It is a strange sort of peace to be so close to death. What is it, she wonders, to die? Is it only to finally, finally stop moving? 

Sara brushes her gloved fingers along the collar of the man’s shirt. She sees marks on his neck; love bites. How alive he had been then, beneath the teeth, the tongue that tasted his heart thumping through his throat. Had the stillness already begun by that early hour? Could death really be so sudden, or was there some invisible mark, some trace evidence of what was to come? 

Morbid thoughts. Sara shook her head slightly, and raised her camera to trap this unmoving man along two dimensions. 

~*~

“Oh, honey,” he moans.

Grissom’s skin is warm though he’s not sweating aside from a little wetness at his temples that causes his hair to curl close against the skin of his forehead. Her eyes half open, she sees the angle of his jaw where it meets his ear, the slope of his shoulder, the nape of his neck. She runs a palm down his back, the muscles there coiling with his forward movements, her other hand holding his head against her, as if she needs to keep him there, as if he might slip away if she lets him go. He is sliding into her, a slow, delicious ache that coils tighter and tighter as he presses his hips down against hers as he bottoms out. She feels his ragged breaths in the bellows of his lungs, his hands, one gripping her hip, his thumb pressing bruisingly into the blade of her pelvic bone, the other by her head, bracing him up. He pushes in again, and the ache is deeper, sweeter, tighter. Sara tenses her stomach to draw her hips up, and then as he thrusts he hits just right, and his grinding moan in her ear vibrates through her skeleton, chattering her teeth together. Her heart batters against her ribs. A flush is creeping up her body. He leans down just a little, deepening the angle, his chest scraping her nipples, and she’s gone.

“ _Fuck,”_ she rasps, not very loudly, her words more air than sound into his sweet-smelling hair. He ducks his mouth against her neck in response, grinding into her as her orgasm pulses around him. She feels the rhythmic pull of it like a wash of liquid gold, once, twice, three times, slowly unfurling into a boneless pleasure as he keeps moving, more gently now, even as she feels the muscles of his shoulder quaking with tension, his breaths stuttering hotly against her neck. “Come,” she instructs, tangling her fingers in his hair, “come inside me.” 

He leans back just a little, just enough to look at her. His pupils are wide and his cheeks are red. He’s so beautiful she could weep. He smiles faintly as their eyes meet, even as his face constricts with the pleasure of his impending orgasm. “Honey,” he says again, ending the word in a little breathless sound. He rolls forward, shifting himself deeper inside her - _oh_ \- and she sees he is about to come, his mouth drawing into a grimace, his eyes tightening, his eyes shifting out of focus as he speeds up and pushes into her with his full weight and then once more and twice more and then he is tensing, the muscles of his stomach hard and the air pushed out of him in a whoosh and she feels the hot pulsing inside her. He shivers above her for a moment, caught in the livewire pleasure of it, before his body eases down and he draws a long breath. 

Lying alongside her, he is soft and warm and heavy. Sara kisses the side of his face, his shoulder - what she can reach without moving. He hums, the sound moving along her skin. His winds one arm around her waist, pulling her into him. 

“When’s your flight tomorrow?” she asks, letting her lips brush against the strange architecture of his ear. 

He grunts a little as he shifts until his head is propped on his palm, elbow bent. He looks down at her through hooded eyes. “2pm.”

“I’ll drop you at noon.”

“Thank you,” he says. He lifts the hand not holding him up and smoothes it down between her breasts, over her belly. His palm is a little calloused. “You’re so beautiful.”

She isn’t used to a lover like him. Not that she’s been treated roughly, as a rule; most of her partners have been good enough men - not violent, at any rate - but not Grissom, so gentle, so calm, looking at her with an unhurried warmth in his eyes. 

_I could spend my life with him,_ Sara thinks with a startling clarity. She feels she is discovering the edges of something new and important, some unmapped land of discovery, and she can hear the echoes of his tender heart in this moment, like sunlight gleaming off the ocean. She is seeing a life - a life with him - a wonderful life. 

“When will I see you again?” she asks.

Something shivers across his face, sketchy and fractured. He is looking at his hand on her stomach, fingers fanned out, thumb swiping along her hip. “I don’t know,” he says softly. 

“Do you want to see me again?” she asks astutely.

He looks up at her, his cool eyes unreadable. “Yes,” he replies with conviction. He draws in a slow breath and breathes it out. “I’m not really in a position to… to do justice by this,” he says vaguely. He must see that she isn’t understanding because he closes his eyes in a look of pained frustration. “I hope we can be friends,” he manages after a moment.

Sara mulls on this quietly. His words seem like a rejection, but she doesn’t feel rejected - she feels, under his warm hand on her stomach, his warm eyes, quite wanted. He doesn’t live in San Francisco; he is probably ten or fifteen or twenty years older than her. She can understand what he’s saying, in a way, and she thinks she might agree. She is only twenty six years old - she isn’t sure she’s ready to find her soul-mate. And Sara feels sure he is as wonderful a friend as he is a lover. “I’d like that,” she replies.

His expression unfolds into a slow, blooming smile that glows with loving joy. She could live in that smile. She could build a life beneath his eyes. 


	3. Stonecrop

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time jump to first season of CSI, Grissom POV. I'm enjoying filling in the parts between the cases and episode - the more social and emotional experiences of Gilbert and his trusty gang of sleuths. Also, this is last time GG is gonna be getting laid for a while, so, in order to remain true to my purpose of dreaming up all the sex that CSI didn't have, there will be some seriously saucy self-love beginning in our entomologist's next POV chapter.

~*~

He didn’t  _ want  _ to love her. This was an essential fact for understanding what happened in that first year and indeed the years to follow. He hadn’t chosen her, he hadn’t sought her out. She wasn’t who he was looking for. The love had come unexpected, unasked for, like a cancer, and like a cancer he had ignored the early signs, the small aches and pains indicating some foreign process, not understanding the seriousness of the condition until it was far too late: the love had metastasized throughout every corner of him, and all hope of recovery was long lost. 

He had, to his credit, decided not to remain sexually involved with her once he asked her to come to Las Vegas, and he stuck to that decision unwaveringly if one did not count the slow, deep kiss the first day in her hotel room that had unfolded quite as naturally and inevitably as drawing in a deep breath after being underwater. She had begun unbuttoning his shirt but he’d stopped her hands and stepped away, still slightly smiling, though whatever expression was on his face caused her to flush red and look down at her toes. He hadn’t meant to shame her. He could have explained it then, perhaps, and, in hindsight, he wishes he had, but it had seemed redundant at the time - if it wasn’t obvious why they couldn’t be involved, then no explanation could make her understand. 

Things would be different now. Things would be better.  
  


~*~

The annual graveyard shift holiday part was a tradition of dubious origin - Catherine insisted that Jim had started it, but Jim, overhearing this declaration, had only rolled his eyes and replied, “Yeah, right, captain of Christmas spirit over here,” as he strode away down the hall. Grissom only knew it had had nothing to do with him, and indeed he had nearly been forgotten from the invite list the first two years. 

But the tradition, however it began, was now established. Grissom had dutifully arrived before Catherine - supervisorship forgotten in the wake of older and more powerful hierarchies - awaiting his assignment. “Dessert,” she had declared, waving her hand vaguely over him like a knight with an invisible sword. To Nick she had turned and said, “drinks.” Warrick was bringing a casserole.

Sara, lurking in the corner of the breakroom like a stray hiding while the dog catchers drive past, only stared, her eyes as wide as moons in her face. Catherine had been almost out the door when Nick said, “why doesn’t Sara have to bring anything?”

Catherine had paused, pivoting on her heel to fix the younger woman with a speculative look that, if Grissom were being honest, bordered on open dislike. He didn’t understand why Catherine hadn’t warmed up to Sara - how could anybody dislike her? - but he tried his utmost to stay out of it. “You’re coming?” Catherine asked.

Sara’s eyes widened impossibly further.

“Of course,” Nick said. “Why wouldn’t she?” Turning to Grissom: “She’s off, right?”

Grissom shifted his jaw, regarding his subordinates. “Someone will have to be on call.”   
  


“I’m happy to just work,” Sara volunteered immediately, edging towards the break room door. “I’m, um, not a big holiday person.”

Warrick looked at Sara like she was trying to pull one over on him. Nick turned again to Grissom in an expression of outrage, as though it were his responsibility to convince Sara to enjoy Christmas. 

Catherine saved him: “No, no, Sara. It’s the graveyard shift party, and you’re a part of the shift. Come. Bring… wine.”

And so it was said.

~*~

Catherine, stunning as a goddess in a blood red dress that made her hair shine like golden fire, pressed the shot glass into Grissom’s hand.

“Cath,” he said, and here he would maintain with utter conviction that his voice was  _ not  _ whining, regardless of what Jim Brass had to say on the matter, “you’re gonna kill me.”

“Take your medicine,” she replied severely. There was no sign of mercy in her hazel eyes.

Grissom obeyed. The tequila ran a spicy streak down his throat. Jim clapped an approving hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Gil,” he laughed, peering at the drunk entomologist with an expression of utter delight, “the worst that happens, you end up making out with one of your subordinates and puking on Catherine’s persian rug.”

Grissom paled. 

“Don’t torture him,” Catherine scolded, gripping Grissom’s elbow and steering him towards the main room. She gave him a light shove in the direction of a very beautiful and very boring detective Catherine had invited in order to foist upon him. Grissom veered a sharp left. 

“Hey boss,” greeted Warrick, sprawled against the bar looking like smoke and soft leather. 

“Mm,” replied Grissom, trying to focus his eyes. He turned to see Nick dancing with a brown haired girl. “Lotta elbows,” Grissom observed, bending his arms in demonstration.

Warrick’s nostrils flared as he resisted a laugh. “Nick’s got the moves, man. Don’t knock it.”

A moment’s further observation revealed the brown-haired girl was, in fact, Sara Sidle. She was looking shockingly young in a sleeveless cotton dress, her hair up in a loose bun, long-limbed and milk-skinned. Grissom pulled down the bottle of whiskey from the bar and poured himself a drink.

“You good, boss?” Warrick asked, eyeing his superior with some concern.

Grissom only shook his head.

Warrick handed Grissom a second glass, indicating he should fill it. “She  _ is  _ beautiful,” Warrick continued. “And very… tenacious. I can see why you’d like that in a woman.”

Grissom paused, his drink halfway to his mouth, and stared up at his favorite CSI.

Warrick sipped his whiskey, hissed at the burn. “What?” he asked, his eyebrow twitching up. “Don’t worry. I don’t think the others notice.”

Grissom downed his drink in one go. He was saved from having to respond by the approach of his other two subordinates. 

Sara came straight to Grissom, laughing, flushed, beautiful in a way that made the back of his tongue ache. She was also clearly drunk, and draped herself on Grissom’s arm without a hint of self-consciousness. She smelled like margaritas and her floral shampoo.

“Damn,” said Nick, shaking out his legs, “the girl can move.” 

Warrick snorted. “You might be less tired if you stopped dancing like a hillbilly in a two-bit western,” he observed.

Nick howled, clapping his hand over his heart. Catherine materialized at his elbow, all grace and good hair products. “Oh?” she asked, peering up thoughtfully at Warrick Brown. “Care to demonstrate some superior technique?”

But Warrick shook his head, dropping his chin. “I’m no dancer.”

“Fine,” she conceded immediately, and turning - good lord - to fix her wretched claws upon Grissom. “You’ll have to do.”

“ _ Grissom? _ ” Nick and Sara both chorused in disbelief.

“Cath,” he pleaded, choking slightly as Catherine used his bright green Grinch tie as a leash to drag him out towards the dance floor. “Catherine, please...”

“This is our  _ song _ , Gil!” Catherine declared, loudly enough that Jim Brass turned from where he was gesticulating wildly to Al Robbins. 

She was, he had to admit, correct. Every holiday party from the time they began, Catherine had dragged him out to dance to this tune - James Brown, he couldn’t remember the name of the song, something fast and funky. Catherine moved like a snake through sand, sultry and loose. Grissom was a capable dancer: a well-guarded secret, at least for the other 364 days of the year. He spun her; she spun him; he snapped her back, and she tumbled gracefully against his arm, spiralled out again. It was really quite nice, dancing with a beautiful woman you weren’t trying to impress.

Nick intervened before the next dance could start, mercifully, and Catherine laughed as he tried and mostly failed to match her moves. Grissom knew this was a perfect moment for escape. 

It was the alcohol. It really was, though - he wouldn’t have done it sober, he wouldn’t have even considered it, at least not until he was back in the safe solitude of his townhouse. But he’d had a  _ lot  _ of alcohol, and now here she was, tall and rangy, gap-toothed, laughing, her cool arms around his neck, her willowy body leaning on his.

“You can dance!” she cried, delighted. He grinned, knew distantly how dopey he probably looked. Spun her. Dipped her low. The song slowed, and so did he, curling her into his elbow. She leaned her cheek on his shoulder. 

When it was over, he pulled her to the bar, sticking one hand deep in his pocket. “Here,” he said, pulling out a small cylindrical object wrapped meticulously in Calvin and Hobbes comics - his favorite strip. He handed it to Sara, who stared at it in surprise. “For Christmas.” She looked blankly at him; Grissom gestured vaguely. “A present.”

Sara’s eyes widened, and her mouth formed a silent ‘oh’. Her eyes darted over his face, and after a moment she delicately peeled back the comic paper, not tearing it even a little, her slender, graceful fingers revealing a jar of brick red powder. A grin blossomed across her face. “Red creeper! Gris! This is great!” 

He nodded knowledgeably. It w _ as  _ great - he’d know, he made it. 

He didn’t know it yet, but this was to be a new tradition, as consistent as the holiday party, though less spoken of. He would present her with a small gift at Christmas every year from this year forward until the end of his life. She would not - not for many years - reciprocate. It would have changed the dynamism of the interaction; she gave him too much, most of the time, and in this small way, one of a very few such ways, he could set the scales back. Give her something she would value, no strings attached. 

Sara leaned up and kissed the edge of his lips. Grissom repressed a shiver. “Thank you,” she said, too soft. Grissom cleared his throat.

“Welcome,” he said. He spied Al Robbins monologuing to Warrick about something, and slithered away from Sara’s too-watchful eyes, wondering if he’d slipped up somewhere along the way, a sense of foreboding in his chest. He couldn’t spot the false step yet, but he knew, with that nauseating gut pull of gravity, that he had tripped, was falling. 

~*~

She adjusted to the lab, in his opinion, remarkably well, and gave him no reason to doubt his sound judgment in hiring her. Bringing her to Las Vegas had been the correct decision, as had been setting a clear, professional boundary. Their dalliance in San Francisco had been just that - an occurrence, an irregularity, even, at least for him, a inexplicable spike of feeling on the flatline graph of his heart - but it would fade out of memory soon enough, as all things did. They had a warm camaraderie in their work, and even flirtations; he was a brilliant investigator, but not of human relationships, and so it was easy for him to misinterpret the evidence, to dismiss the pull of longing that corded from his solar plexus to somewhere below her collarbone, to put out of mind the flush of honeyed pleasure when she tried not to smile at his teasing. The banter was not consequential, or even the desire to touch her, to make love to her again; all of these things were explainable, were hoofbeats - think horses, not zebras - but the first real symptom, if Grissom thought about it, the first definite sign of the pathology growing inside him, was the  _ pain _ . The worry. The hurt. The wish, desperate enough to make his fingertips buzz electrically, that he could make her happy, and that she would understand him. 

Kaye Shelton was the first crack in the levee. Pam Adler was a breach.

~*~

He didn’t dream about the rape, or the woman lying forever senseless in her hospital bed, or even Sara’s tears; he dreamt of her singing. 

_ Gonna find you… gonna find you…  _

He couldn’t remember if he touched her. There was a passing glimpse, as he woke, of her neck, bone-pale, the ridge of her tendon corded out as perhaps she tilted her chin up to welcome his advance. She wasn’t always welcoming, when he dreamt of her. But maybe tonight she was. 

_ One way.. or another… _

Laying in his cool bed sheets, his comforter tangled around his legs, he tried not to think of her, lanky and sad-eyed as she spoke to the woman, stooped over the hospital bed. Saints, she had been saying something about saints. Martyrs. Women who died for the faith.

Later that night he had found her again, and again she didn’t see him and so he watched her. Singing. Clicking through reports, hundreds. Her eyes red. Not from tears - not yet. Trying to identify the ‘poor woman’ before she died.

Evidence, he had told her. That woman is evidence.

Then, some part of him answered, here in the secret-heavy dark of his lonely bedroom, Sara was evidence too. Not of rape or attempted murder - no - a far more subtle crime: evidence of something inside of him that he had long thought absent but, based upon the screeching pain that was radiating from the middle of him like bones scraping loose against each other, maybe was only badly broken. 

_ I’m gonna get ya… I’m gonna get ya… _

Her voice was so clear in his ears he closed his eyes and felt like she was there with him, as close as she’d been in his office, crying like she had the right to, crying in front of him like she had nothing to be ashamed of. 

_ I wish I was like you, Grissom… _

Where did she get that heart from, anyway? Didn’t she know that she was giving away precious pieces of her soul to these victims who would never repay her? Didn’t she realize that two or three years on this track would leave her ghost-hollow and living only by the sadness in her blood like ocean brine? 

It had been fun, in San Francisco: the scalding heat of her, that wildfire anguish in her eyes, the way she seemed as fast and reckless with her affection as she was with her driving. It wasn’t fun anymore. She was too fast, too reckless, and a crash was inevitable. He didn’t want to be destroyed. 

_ I wish I didn’t feel anything. _

~*~

Teri Miller was exactly the kind of woman Grissom’s mother would be proud of. Growing up, his mother had always said that the woman he chose to spend his life with ought to have dignity and poise and self-possession, be driven, be well-cultured, come from a nice family. “You deserve the best,” she would say to him, her face and her hands speaking - his first memory of his mother is the smell of her shirt as she held him, but the second is of her hands, strong and small and ridged with veins. “Don’t settle for anything less.”

He had not settled for anything less. He hadn’t settled at all. He was perennially single, unattached, floating unmoored through the world, women occasionally snagging on him like leaves tangling on driftwood but never tying him down. His first serious girlfriend, Julia, was a Deaf woman whom his mother adored, and Grissom had tried, very sincerely, to love her as much as his mother did, but he never stopped feeling like he was an actor in a stage play when Julia was around; like she had taken one look at him and decided he’d fit the role she needed filled, and she had no interest in the other superfluous details of him, such as his heart and soul. He’d had another longer term girlfriend in Minnesota, a scientist who studied deciduous forests. She was quiet like him, and they made a peaceful pair, drifting along together until one day he drifted away, hardly ever to think of her again. 

It suited him well enough: Grissom was a creature of solitude. His favorite companions were generally ones in glass cases or floating in jars of alcohol. There were people who were important, like Catherine, who had come and chipped steadily away at the limestone surfaces of him until she made a crater large enough to suit her purposes, and in that crater she was safe from harm: he would not abandon her, or betray her, would do his best to defend her. The crater never grew and it never shrank; it was not alive; it was a feature of his geography, and so was she, whenever she chose to visit him there. Likewise with Jim Brass and Al Robbins. Beyond those small pockmarks, he was a cliff-face, smooth and steep, and very little could find traction on him, almost nothing could grow. He preferred the dead.

Mostly. Every once in a blue moon, Grissom desired companionship.  _ He _ was not dead; he was not immune to long nights alone in his bed, wondering what it would be like if he did die there, wondering who would miss him. Longing for touch, for sex, for connection. When he met Teri Miller, he thought:  _ she may be suitable.  _ He was struck by her elegance and her good humor, felt shy around her, a little boyish. Enjoyed the way her eyes moved down his body like a slow stroke. 

Now, her neatly trimmed fingernails brushing very lightly against his sternum as she unfastened the buttons of his shirt, Grissom inwardly congratulated himself upon his success. It had all proceeded with remarkable finesse: he had noticed her; she had noticed him; he suggested, very lightly, his interest; she had reciprocated and advanced the flirtation; he had requested they escalate to a date; she had (with a pause of several weeks, during which time he wondered if he had seriously miscalculated) accepted. The date had - and he was big enough to admit this - been a blunder. He had taken a work call, and she had taken her leave. He had figured that would be the end of things, and she refused him when he asked to try again, refused and then offered this instead - “Why don’t I drop by for a drink?”

A code, easily comprehended; an offer. He gladly accepted.

“This color suits you,” Teri said, referring to the robin’s egg blue shirt. It had been - and here Grissom reminded himself not to outwardly reveal his amusement - a gift from his mother. Teri smoothed her cool, dry hand from his pectoral muscle down over his ribs and across his stomach. She tugged his shirt out from his waistband. “Alright,” she said quietly, looking him over thoughtfully. Her eyes skipped up to meet his. She smiled. 

Grissom cupped her face in one hand, running the pad of his thumb over her lower lip. It was painted dark red, the exact shade worn by a dead woman whose body he’d processed earlier that day. It made Grissom slightly reluctant to kiss her, but he did so anyway, slotting her upper lip between his lips. She was a good kisser; she let him take the lead, and he proceeded with caution, running the backs of his fingers down her neck, careful not to disturb her hair. She tasted like her lipstick and maybe a hint of cranberry juice. Grissom touched his tongue tentatively to her lower lip. She parted her mouth slightly, signalling he may proceed. 

The inside of her mouth was a bit of a shock, though it shouldn’t have been: where the rest of her was cool, her mouth was hot and wet and slippery, and Grissom felt - with some relief - the first fizzling of arousal in his gut, twitching in his cock. 

He felt a small hand encircle his wrist, and Teri guided him to her breast. He felt her gently, mapping the weight in his palm, the shape, circling his thumb around her areola, not quite touching her nipple. When he did finally swipe over the nub he was pleased to find it stiff, as though awaiting him, like a student waving an eager hand in class. Grissom smiled against her mouth. He unbuttoned her blouse slowly, slipping the fabric over her shoulders.

A few minutes later found her spread out over his navy blue bed sheets, her blonde hair spilled around her face like an upturned glass of milk. He kissed her breasts and her nipples and over her ribs, tugging her panties down and off, kissed his way to her hip, bit very lightly at her pelvic bone. The smell of her was heady, that distinct, almost burnt smell of an aroused woman. With a glance up at her to confirm her consent, he flattened his tongue over her vulva.

It didn’t take her very long to orgasm, her fingers scratching at his hair, her body arched like a bowstring drawn back to fire. The feel of her vagina pulsing around his fingers was intensely arousing, and he wanted very much to have intercourse with her, but as he moved up her body he was surprised to have her nudge at him to shift onto his back. “I’m not on contraceptives,” she explained, her voice rough with her pleasure, “and I don’t like condoms.” She slipped down him and, with one gleeful look upwards, took him in her mouth.

Grissom pressed his head back into the pillow, closing his eyes on his sharp exhale. Although her speciality was the study of human bones, Teri was clearly well-versed in anatomy of the flesh, her tongue alighting expertly on his frenulum, circling around his glans. She eased up just in time, licking long stripes up his shaft, keeping him as high as she could bring him without tipping over. Grissom pressed his knuckles into his eyelids. Stars burst in his vision. 

_ You want to sleep with me?  _

Had Sara done this in that airplane bathroom, hardly out of adolescence, all coltish long legs and arms and those doe-eyes looking up? Grissom moaned helplessly, pressing his knuckles harder until his eyes ached with the pressure. She had done this with him, of course; the memory washed over him now, the way she’d looked so shy, her cheek resting against his hip as she pulled off his boxer-briefs. 

Teri sucked lightly at his penis, and  _ god _ , the heat, the wetness, the slide of her tongue - his thighs tensed and he deliberately relaxed, trying to keep himself from coming - 

Sara had been radiant, so fucking sexy it had made his head swim, just hardly licking at him to start, like he was a new cuisine she wanted to savor the first flavor of -

Grissom peeled his eyes open, looking down at the blonde head bobbing in his lap. He made a valiant attempt to keep his thoughts in the present moment, noticing the red of her lipstick smearing onto his cock. The visual was good, but the memory of Sara was better; god, what was  _ wrong _ with him - 

he thought of her face as she came around his cock, yes, god, so beautiful, her brows scrunched together and the flush down her breasts, that soft sound she made - fuck -

Teri pressed down until the head of his penis hit the back of her throat and he was gone, the pleasure bursting through his body, his abdomen tensing, Sara’s gorgeous face emblazoned in his memory, the rhythmic pulsing of himself coming down Teri’s throat as she swallowed.

He floated gradually back down to earth, a leaf on a breeze. Teri excused herself to the restroom and returned looking as flawlessly poised as ever, not a stitch out of place, her lipstick perfectly touched up. Grissom gazed at her in admiration. She was something else.

“That was amazing,” he said, catching his breath. 

Teri gave him a small smile, her mouth like a horizontal parentheses. “I’ll be headed out shortly.” 

Grissom nodded, forcing himself up out of the bed to escort her to the door. They parted with a small kiss, cheek to cheek. “Should I call you?” Grissom asked.

Teri paused, her cool blue eyes studying him like he was a femur found in a burial site. “Who were you thinking of?”

Grissom’s mouth parted, his eyes tightening. He recoiled unconsciously into the doorframe. He thought of saying,  _ you _ , but he wasn’t a liar. Had he given it away? Had she really read him so accurately?

Teri shook her head slightly. “Maybe she’s the one you should call. Good to see you again, Gil.” 

Grissom closed the door, locked it. Blew out a slow breath. Took a shower, and went to change his sheets. 

~*~

Teri had been a mistake. He could see that clearly now. She had indeed embodied many of the characteristics Grissom long believed to constitute an ideal romantic mate, but he hadn’t - and here he was somewhat amazed at his own oversight, although perhaps, given the circumstances, he could be forgiven - but he hadn’t actually possessed any tender or romantic feelings towards her. She was an attractive and charming woman, to be sure, and their sexual liaison was enjoyable while it lasted, but afterwards Grissom felt vaguely like he’d used her, though it hadn’t been his intent. It had been nothing at all like the previous sexual encounter he’d had: Sara’s smell and eyes and touch, the world narrowing to the sensation of each nerve ending as it registered her texture, to the microexpressions of her young face, to her trembling breaths. That encounter, in its own, different way, had equally been a mistake. Where his interest in Teri lacked passion, his interest in Sara lacked rationality. 

And it wasn’t really acceptable, Grissom acknowledged, for him to have sex with Teri and think of Sara. Another part of him - a deeper, wordless piece of himself that he often believed did not even exist within him - felt it was wrong for him to pursue a romantic relationship without Sara’s knowing. She wasn’t his girlfriend, or his partner, or even his date, but she was  _ his  _ in some ill-defined way that made his ears redden to think about. Maybe not least of all because she was nobody else’s. She had come to Las Vegas at his behest, left behind her community, her roots. She had never mentioned any relatives or close friends. She was a lonely creature, vulnerable and tough and fiercely kind, on her own in the dark world except, of course, for him, and he wasn’t sure what the nature of his responsibility to her was, but he knew it was important. 

Pursuing a relationship with her was one thing. Betraying her was another altogether. 

Grissom hoped that he had not pursued Teri in order to shift his focus away from Sara, but now that it was over with, he was sorry to admit he couldn’t be sure. Regardless of his motivations, the conclusion was clear: this persistent emotional attachment to Sara,  _ whatever  _ it was, could no more be erased by his conscious choice as it could be acknowledged or acted upon. That left him in a stalemate, perhaps, but tangibly created very little shift in his world from where it had been before he’d met Sara Sidle: still single, still living on his own island of thought, still obsessed with his work. Nobody need ever know about the tiny plant growing in the tiny crack in the sheer cliff-face of his soul. 

Not ideal. No. But quite manageable. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoiler alert, Gilbert: Hurricane Hank rapidly approaching Denial Island.


	4. Language of Flowers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sara POV, follows season 2.

~*~

Sara ends up sending only a postcard, and not a tasteful one. She considered a few of pretty red rocks from the desert or fearsome looking cacti, but in the end she settled on a gleaming photo of the strip, the lights blurred from a slow shutter. On the back she writes her name and her new PO box, and only a short note - she wouldn’t let anyone read it, so one couldn’t be sure what it said, but maybe it went something like this:

_ Mom - _

_ I’ve moved to Las Vegas. I have a good job here. I hope you are well. I think of you. _

_ \- Sara _

Formal, polite. Some would say cold. As unlike the woman who wrote it as imaginable, perhaps, but truthful, in its own way. Not as truthful as the five or six sheets of paper she’ll burn in her kitchen sink that night: long letters hand written in smudged ink, memories and fragments of dreams, a description that Sara thinks doesn’t do him justice - blue eyes, and intense, mom, he’s so intense - the conversations she’s never had with the woman who formed her, whose body was her first home. 

Sara finds it hard to stay connected to the past. She gets the distinct feeling at times as though she has lived many different lives, been many different people: the girl in her father’s house, the girl in many houses, the girl at Harvard, the woman in San Francisco. Gil Grissom’s star pupil. Gil Grissom’s lover. Gil Grissom’s CSI. 

She wonders how long this life will last. 

~*~

She’s on her sixth episode of  _ Buffy the Vampire Slayer  _ (she owns them all on DVD) when he calls. 

“I’m still alive,” she says, not giving her name, not even checking the caller ID. 

“Temperature?”

She looks over her shoulder towards the thermometer sitting on her bedside table. “Hang on,” she grunts, reaching for it. She sets it under her tongue. 

They sit together on the line in silence for the two minutes it takes to read her temperature. It had been an uncomfortable silence, when he first called yesterday after sending her home from a scene. Now, it felt almost warm. 

The thermometer beeps. “102.”

“Good, it’s going down. How’re you feeling? Your throat?”

“I feel like shit,” she replies truthfully. Why lie to him? “Did Greg process that semen off the sheets yet?”

“No,” he says, sounding a little sour. “Catherine sweet-talked him into putting her buccal first.”

“I could come in and go over missing person reports. I wouldn’t go in the field. And I’d sanitize my desk after.”

“Sara.” 

She sighs, leaning back against the pillows. It reminds her of when he used to call, back when she was a sea-storm woman he looked for like a lighthouse in the crashing rain. Now she is CSI Sidle with a temperature of 102. “I’m so bored.”

In the stillness and the silence of her empty apartment, the TV’s long fingers glowing on her peeling wallpaint, she smells the musty smells of an old apartment, not well sealed, maybe with mold. Her eyes have grown used to the dark and move cat-like over the familiar shapes of her lamp and dresser and the magazines piled on her desk and the slow rumble of cars past her window, the swampish cast of their headlights, so infrequent compared to the beating heart of the city where she used to live. When she says she is bored, she doesn’t mean she feels pathetic, although, if she assessed the situation objectively, she would probably agree that she is; she doesn’t even feel lonely, only his tinny-telephone voice for company, the worry she feels floating through the sound waves all way from the lab, buzzing along the thick black cables that criss-cross the world like fading scars. 

When she says she feels bored, what she means is that she doesn’t really feel anything at all. 

“You’ll survive a few days of boredom,” he replies, professorial in a way she wishes didn’t charm her. She knows he is treating her like a woman, a liability. She ought to be outraged by his coddling but she isn’t. She has always been a mess of contradictions, a hissing prickle of thorns and raw pulp that only wanted to be held. “That means you’re resting.”

“I can come and rest in front of the computer while I look through missing person reports.”

“No, Sara. You need to rest, you need to take care of yourself. I - I’m concerned about you. I keep having this waking nightmare that I’m going to get a call to go identify your body in the morgue because you died of pneumonia rather than spending a day in bed.”

She sighs. He is not wrong to worry. Sara is feeling, in this moment, a little sorry to have moved to Las Vegas, where she knows no one, where she is nameless, this strange land of neon lights and parched throats and debts that can never be repaid, where she might disappear into the chalk dust of the desert someday, unmissed and unlooked for, fading like track in the sand, the only trace of her a small square smiling photo tacked up on Gil Grissom’s fishboard: the ones that got away. 

“Then why don’t you just come over and check on me yourself? You’ll see I’m fine.” 

Her words thicken up and ooze like syrup through the small holes of her microphone, and she can hear them, distantly, clanging along the telephone lines, hears them as they tumble out of Grissom’s earpiece and lodge like shrapnel against his eardrum, maybe one or two tiny fragments bursting through his middle ear and sinking straight into the vulnerable moist flesh of his brain. “No,” he says, and she could write a whole dictionary on Gil Grissom’s ‘no’s, all the many meanings and inflections, all the feelings contained inside of them - hope and dread and shock and rage and love and laughter and a cold, silent death. “No, Sara, that isn’t necessary. And I’m… I’m busy here...” She hears the soft whoosh of his breath, the sort of slow exhale he makes when he’s swallowed some thought like a fishbone and it’s stuck in his throat. “Unless… you need me… for something…”

“No,” says Sara, sharp, a little offended. She doesn’t  _ need  _ him. She is not a child anymore. She is not sure she ever was one.

“Okay,” he says. “Keep resting. I’ll call again in a few hours.”

Sara hangs up the phone and restarts her show, glad to be done with that strange song of ‘no’s. 

~*~

When she comes back in on Wednesday, Grissom tells her they’ve got an empty apartment with blood-splattered walls. The rest of the team shuffle out of the conference room, and Sara rises to get another cup of coffee before she goes to get her coveralls.

“That’s your third this morning,” Grissom comments. She turns to find him hanging in the doorway, looking concerned and disapproving but mostly looking awkward.

She shrugs. 

Grissom looks down the hall to his left and looks to his right, like he is about to spill some dirty secret. But instead he moves into the room and steps up into her space, smelling like laundry detergent and the lotion he puts on after he shaves, and the backs of his cool fingers are pressing to her forehead. “You’re still a little feverish.”

Sara sips at her coffee as he drops his hand. He is searching her face for something, she doesn’t know what - contrition? Vitality? “I run hot.”

His mouth twitches in a smile before he presses his lips together and steps away. “Meet me by the car.” He gives her one last lingering look over his shoulder, like he wishes he could wrap her in a blanket and tuck her into his breast pocket for safekeeping. 

~*~

It was his idea to go bowling, which is why it’s funny that he’s so bad. 

“Do you want rails?” she laughs.

He blushes, raking one hand through his shaggy hair. “I’m just nervous,” he explains, taking a long pull from the yellowish beer he’s drinking in a thin plastic cup.

Sara sits on one of the slippery linoleum tables, her ankles kicking back and forth in a way she doesn’t realize looks girlish. “Nervous about what?”

He shoots her a sidelong look, and his blush spreads up to his ears. “About… about this.” He sighs, waiting for his ball to expel from the conveyor like a cat retching up a hairball. “I want to impress you.”

Sara feels giddy and sultry, feels his longing bathing over her skin like warm sunlight. She doesn’t crave him, he doesn’t set her on fire, but it feels good to be around him, and that’s something. “Don’t worry. You’re very impressive.”

He grins, wide and silly and warm. Sara is still amazed, after all these years, to see men wear kindness so boldly. 

Her hip beeps. Again.

Hank raises his eyebrows. “Maybe while you call your boss, I can actually have a successful roll.”

Sara nods, appreciating his understanding. She makes her way through the smoke-tangy bowling alley, side stepping men in velour shirts with thick collars, careful not to tread on the small toes of barefoot toddlers cheering on their older siblings, tasting the soda pop and cigarettes and popcorn on her tongue. Steps through the double doors into the sharp cold of the desert night.

“Hey,” she says, as she hears him grunt his name, “I got your page.”

“Did you?” he replies irritably. “Because I first paged you two hours ago, Sara.”

“Yeah, well,” Sara says, picking at some crusted ketchup on her jeans and feeling like a surly teenager arguing with teacher, “it is my night off, Grissom. I think taking a while to answer a page is sort of the point.”

“Where are you?” he asks, non-sequitur. “Is something wrong? I can hear voices.”

Sara shoots a recriminating look at the teenagers passing around a blunt by the dumpsters a few feet away. “I’m out.”

“Out  _ where _ ?” he asks. 

Sara knows Grissom isn’t wondering if she’s bowling or playing pool. He means,  _ with who.  _ “Is there a reason you paged or are you just checking up on me? Because in that case maybe a GPS on my car would be easier for both of us.”

A tense moment of silence. “I’ve got a 419 on the strip I want you to help Nick with.”

Sara sighs, knowing the sound of it must scrape against his ear miles away in the Las Vegas Crime Lab. She wants to refuse him, but he would know, then, she was out somewhere, with someone. And for a reason Sara can’t really justify, she does not want Grissom to know. “Give me an hour.”

“An  _ hour _ ,” he parrots incredulously.

“I’m just finishing up my grocery shopping for the week and I need to get my food home before I can head out.”

She hears his soft, relieved breath. It shouldn’t please her, but it does.

It shouldn’t feel so easy to lie to him, but it is.

~*~

The rhythm of her nights is like a heartbeat, slow and untiring, and Sara feels the repetition starting to blister against her skin. She is tired of the sleepless lights and the hot wind and the sand, gritty, chafing, scraping away at her. She is tired of the desert, vast and inexorable, a thousand miles of silence and slow death. She is tired of Grissom, the oasis of his cool eyes, his fingers never quite brushing her electric skin. 

She is just tired.

“You should get out more.”

Nick is pulling a shirt over his muscular body, broad, built to kill or at least to move around heavy objects. Sara tries for a moment to be attracted to him, searches herself like a crime scene for some trace evidence of yearning. Nothing. No sign of struggle.

“Out where?” Sara asks. 

Nick only shrugs.

Sara makes her way home, flipping through stations on the radio. Fire and brimstone preachers or pop songs from the eighties, synthy guitar and sugarcane singing. On the square of space where she should put a doormat but never bothered there is a large cardboard box.

Sara brings it inside with her, wondering idly if it is a bomb. She opens it with the scissors in her kitchen. Inside are five stacked black plastic trays, a plastic frame, a booklet and a bag full of worms.

Sara opens the bag. The rust-colored worms writhe, a pulp of wriggling flesh. Sara puts one hand in, feels them undulating against her skin, cold and slippery. 

The booklet says,  _ Vermicomposting for the backyard farmer.  _ Earthworms, Sara realizes, and a tray to keep them in. They will break down her food waste into a black rich compost she can use to fertilize her plants.

She doesn’t need to read the note, but she flips it over anyways where it’s taped to the top tray. He is the only person who gives her Christmas presents. 

_ From Grissom.  _

~*~

She doesn’t remember it’s new year’s eve until Grissom tells her, “just us tonight,” and Sara gives him a look of alarm. He tilts his head in that way of his. “Everyone else asked for the night off.”

Sara realizes it then, and looks at her watch. 10:30pm. “Anything come through?”

He shakes his head. He’s wearing that shapeless brown jacket zipped up to his throat like a priest’s collar. She sees he missed a spot of beard shaving. 

They float around the lab, aimless wraiths, crime solvers with no crime to solve. Sara keeps bumping into him in the hallway, and every time it is oddly embarrassing, as though they shouldn’t be seeing each other, as though the other is continually unexpected.

11pm.

11:30pm.

11:55pm.

The backs of Sara’s thighs are sticking to the leather couch in the breakroom where she lays sprawled, watching the pulsating crowd of Times Square. Newscasters in thick scarves shout into the camera. Sara sucks on a lollipop she found melted onto an empty bag of coffee in the cabinet.

His voice startles her, and she curls up her legs reflexively, hunching herself into a semi-upright position. He is standing with one hand in his pocket and a cup of coffee in his hand, looking down without expression at the television. “Did you know the first ball from the Times Square ball drop was designed by Artkraft Strauss? It was built from iron and wood, had a hundred iridescent bulbs, and weighed 700lbs.”

Grissom peers at her to judge her reception of this factoid. Sara is strongly reminded of the expectant pause of a bird of paradise who has just finished his mating dance. “Come sit,” she says.

He folds himself carefully next to her, not spilling a drop of his brimming coffee cup. Sara bends her knees so her toes are resting a millimeter from his thigh. She gets a wash of deja vu, remembering when he’d taken her feet in his lap, his hands mapping her calves and thighs, back in that other lifetime. 

He doesn’t touch her. He is cupping his coffee like it is the only warmth in the world. 

The countdown begins. Sara watches with idle interest. She has never been terribly drawn to the importance of the new year. She feels as though each day is a new year, as though she is a reptile forever shedding her skin, forever peeling away layers of the past. She can’t imagine staying still for twelve days, not to mention twelve months. 

The ball drops - a chorus of shouts and screams from the television, staticky and too loud. Sara sits forward to grab the remote and lower the volume.

She sits back on the couch. Her shoulder is now touching Grissom’s shoulder. He is warm and solid, sipping at his coffee, not looking at her. 

“Happy new year,” she says, noticing his profile, his pale eyes moving uneasily. 

He tilts his head slightly, looking at her for a moment. She feels that strange, familiar feeling she gets from him sometimes - that throat-thickening tension, that wordless terror. 

Sara tips forward an inch or two and presses a kiss to his soft cheek. He tucks his chin down, shifting his jaw, his ears reddening. “Happy new year,” he mumbles into his coffee cup. 

She knows he wants to kiss her. She knows he won’t.

~*~

It isn’t the hamburger, actually. It isn’t a fight with Hank, either - she only sees him once or twice a month, mostly for the sex, caring and slow and a little awkward. It isn’t even Grissom. 

It’s Greg. She yells at him over a mistake in his DNA report.

He wilts like a plant in hot sun. Sara feels her rage boiling up her throat, and she wants to keep yelling, she wants to see him cowering back against his beeping machines. She wants to make him sorry he ever crossed her.

Sara stalks silently out of the DNA lab to the elevators. Rides to the third floor, takes a left, takes a right. Steps into the HR office and requests a leave of absence form.

She has seen the signs before: her hair trigger temper, her passion corrupted into a reckless hate. The dreams of him have been getting worse: smelling like rum and coke, so tall, that flat sadness in his eyes. There was a letter from Atascadero State Hospital in California in her PO box last week, but Sara stowed it unopened in the shoebox where she keeps all the others.

The past is a hand forever around her throat. The fingers are tightening. It’s time to move on.

~*~

Judy flags her by the front desk. “For you,” she says, looking intensely curious as she hands over a long-stemmed white orchid.

Sara stares at the plant, touching the creamy smoothness of one broad leaf. She sees the card strung by elastic string and flips it open. 

_ From Grissom.  _

Sara snaps off the card. Carries the plant and the card and sets them both in her locker and goes to begin her shift.

At the end of the day she is surprised when she finds it sitting on her jacket, too beautiful for the black square of tin where she stores extra pairs of socks. The plant bumps against the passenger door handle as she drives it home, vaguely worried a pothole will have it spilling its dirt-guts all over the floor of her car. 

She sets the orchid on her counter, then on her bookshelf. It looks out of place in her home, too elegant. Sara touches the leaf again and reflects that Grissom probably wishes she were the sort of woman who liked orchids.

Sara looks again at the card with the neat typed message.  _ From Grissom.  _ He probably panicked over what to say. Which alternatives did he consider?  _ I hope this plant buys your obedience. I hope this plant makes you feel too guilty to leave me. _

_ I hope this plants tell you what I can’t say. _

Sara recycles the small card and picks up her home phone.

“I need you to sign that leave of absence,” she says as he answers, not giving her name.

She can feel his disappointment and despair through the line, crackling statically against her hairline. “Did you get….?”

“The orchid. Yeah. Thanks. It’s pretty.”

“Sara…”

“I’m still leaving.”

She hears his sharp, unhappy exhale. “Look - just - hang on, okay? You’re at home?”

“Yeah.”

He hangs up the phone. Sara blinks as the line beeps in her ear.

She spends only a couple minutes straightening up, mostly just grabbing the dirty underwear and throwing it in the hamper. She’s not trying to be enticing, here, but then again it’s Grissom, and Sara can’t help the flutter of nervous anticipation, the way her blood howls against her temples. What if, what if, what if?

She lets him in on the third knock. 

He looks at her framed in the doorway for only an instant, and then his eyes are skittering past her to take in every detail of her home within his line of sight. “Come in,” she sets, realizing with a boiling flush of shame that she is wearing her tank top and short cotton shorts she sleeps in.

Grissom stuffs his hands in his pockets and toes carefully into her studio, not touching anything, not even brushing against the corner of the desk, like he is afraid of leaving trace evidence, like his presence here is a serious crime. 

“Do you want some water?”

Grissom shakes his head. Looks for a moment at the orchid on her shelf. “It was an apology,” he explains.

“For the hamburger thing. I know.” Sara goes and sits on her bed. Her place is too small for a couch. Grissom edges towards her counter.

“What can I do to make you stay?”

Sara tilts her head down, staring at him in disbelief. “Um. Hit me over the head and tie me up in your closet? Murder me? You could keep my bones as trophies. I have no family who’d come looking for me.”

Grissom gives her a look of real offense. 

Sara stares around her home, wishing fiercely that he would leave. Or that she could lick the anger off his tongue. “What do you want me to say, Grissom?”

“Tell me what you need me to do.”

She lays back on her bed. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Grissom inching backwards towards the door, and she almost laughs, realizing he perhaps assumes this is her answer: on her back on the mattress. “I don’t know,” she replies, somewhat honest. “I think I need something you can’t give me.”

Grissom is inspecting a crystal her old roommate gave her as though it might be the murder weapon in an open case. “Maybe I don’t tell you enough that I care about you.”

Sara sits up, her head swimming dizzily from the sudden movement. “Did Catherine tell you to say that?”

He gives her a sharp, startled look. Shakes his head. “She told me to resolve things between us,” he admits.

“So you sent me a plant?” 

Grissom frowns. He picks up the crystal and rubs it between his palms. “What should I have done?”

“Let me go,” Sara replies instantly. “Isn’t that a kind of resolution? I came here for you. It’s time for me to move on.” 

He looks at her for a moment, inscrutable, still rolling the crystal back and forth between his hands. “You should stay. I want you to stay.”

“Why?” 

It is fascinating, in a distant way, to watch him struggle. He swallows more frequently, and has a tendency to open his mouth as though he will speak and close it again. His blinks are too rapid. “Because I…” He fists his hand around the crystal. Grimaces like somebody’s just said something offensively accurate. “I want you here. I would miss you. You’re important.”

Sara sighs, feeling suddenly very old, like she is approaching the end of her lifetime, like she is just running out of the energy to stay alive. Her heart is slowing down, her skin is paper thin. “I didn’t ask to leave in order to blackmail you into a love confession, Grissom.”

He flinches, and sets the crystal back on its shelf like it had started to burn him. “I wasn’t planning to make one,” he replies waspishly. “Where would you go, anyway? You said you have no family. Why go live amongst a bunch of strangers when you have people here who are your friends?”

Sara feels a little guilty, but chooses the truth anyway: “I can make friends anywhere.”

Grissom’s lip curls in anger. “So we’re replaceable.”

Not him. He knows that. “Grissom, I’m going.”

“Sara,” he shouts, and Sara’s brows narrow in alarm as he pivots to brace against her counter, staring at the carpet, his mouth open, jaw shifted, his eyes tightening as he works against his rising fury, “you can’t just leave people. It’s not okay. Do you understand? You can’t just walk out on people who care about you.”

Sara shakes her head. “People cared about me in San Francisco.”

“Not like I do,” he retorts.

He’s right, but Sara is still amazed to hear him say it. Of course it would be now, only now, in order to keep her with him - his CSI, but not his lover; close, but no closer. “So you want me to stay because it’s wrong to leave you.”

“Because you’re important to me, and that should matter to you.”

Sara feels his words lodging like thorns against the skin of her sternum, working inward, bloody and slow, towards her heart. She wonders if it should make her feel good to hear him say it: it doesn’t. It makes her feel trapped. 

Silence stretches between them. Grissom looks like he’s starting to regret his outburst, shifting uneasily against her counter. “Sara…”

“Alright,” she cuts across him. Picks at a fingernail snag. “I’ll stay.” 

She looks up to see him exhale a quiet breath. Sara stands up and crosses over to where he is standing by her counter, holding himself stiff and upright like a stick insect. Grissom examines her for a moment, blank-faced. He raises both his hands and sets them lightly on either side of her face. Leans slightly forward and kisses her just beneath her left eye. “Good,” he says. “I should go.”

Sara nods. “I’ll see you tonight.”

She locks the door after he closes it. 

~*~

Sara thinks about the beautiful girl picking holes in her face. Self-mutilation. Was it because she had wanted to be more perfect? Or was it because her beauty gripped her like a fist, her skin too tight, a prison of her own flesh? Sara imagines how good it must have felt, peeling open scabs, scooping out moist chunks of tissue and pus and blood. Ridding herself of the foul sludge that boiled beneath the surface. Deconstructing her own existence.

Sara doesn’t weigh herself. She doesn’t have to. She barely eats, she never sleeps.

She laughs to think of Grissom’s face if she showed up at work with weeping sores on her cheeks and chin. Sara has never been that conspicuous, but she isn’t sure that she’s not just as disfigured. Grissom would be horrified, she’s sure, if he ever got close enough to see it. 

Sara dries her hair with a towel, staring into her face in the mirror. She is too pale, too angular, her mouth too wide, her eyes too open. She bares her teeth and growls.

Hank is meeting her for a movie tonight. Sara isn’t sure what it’s about, something with explosions and bouncing breasts. She’ll probably suck him off in the back of the theater and he’ll pet her hair and pant and later buy her a nice dinner. He’ll offer to eat her out and she’ll gently decline because he has no idea what he’s doing. 

Her phone is ringing, and Sara wraps her towel around her wet hair. He’s calling to tell which theater they’re going to.

“Hey baby,” she answers.

A heartbeat of silence - just the one - and she knows, she knows like ice water crashing down her spine, she knows like tripping off the edge of the building, black asphalt rushing up. “Sara. It’s - it’s me. Is now a bad time.”

Sara feels her pulse thundering in her skull. “No - no. Please. I - what’s up?”

“I was calling about the case. I mean, not, not anything new. Just… I was thinking about it.”

“Me too.” Sara sits on her bed, naked, her damp skin cooling under the fan overhead. “She must’ve felt so trapped. So misunderstood. She was tired of looking beautiful and feeling like a leper.”

“She was alone.”

“She had her sister.”

“Yeah. And her sister loved her. But she was still alone. Her sister… didn’t know how to take care of her. How to…” 

Sara licked her lips in his quiet. “How to give her what she needed.”

“Do you think she could’ve been saved?”

“Probably. But only if she wanted to stay alive.”

“And did she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Her sister will never be the same. Her sister is… heartbroken. And truly alone.”

“It’s a tragedy.”

“Sara…”

“Look, Gris, I have to get going. But thanks for calling.”

“... Sure. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“See you.”

Hank holds her hand through the movie, and keeps smiling at her during the funny parts, and there’s no right time for her to duck down and take him in her mouth so she just takes his small smiles instead. Afterwards he kisses her softly and presses her into her car door. “I really like you,” he says, looking at her with no fear at all. “I really like being with you.”

Sara strokes her hand through his hair. He can’t save her either, but at least he tries.

~*~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My headcanon is that Grissom and Sara have always interacted a fair amount more often off-screen than indicated on the show, which is somewhat supported, I think, by their sexual relationship beginning offscreen in season 5/6. 
> 
> I also believe more must have happened between The Plant in "Burden of Proof" and the next episode's Since I Met You to explain the vast tonal shift in GSR interaction.


	5. Acts of Contrition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follows Grissom through Season 3. 
> 
> This season is interesting because it addresses Grissom's hearing loss/impending deafness. I struggled a bit with how to write Grissom's feelings around loss of his hearing. The show depicts him clearly viewing deafness as a life-altering, if not nearly life-ending, possibility. This plays into negative stereotypes of deafness and the Deaf world. In order to stay true to Grissom and his character, I've written him as viewing his loss of hearing as a kind of death, since it will separate him more from those he loves, and he already struggles so desperately with his need for and fear of connection. The show uses his hearing as an analogy for his inability to understand and connect with the people he cares about and needs. This analogy plays into ableist tropes against Deafness. Deaf people are as richly connected, social, communicative and in the world as any hearing person might be.

~*~

Her bathroom sink was white marble shot through with black like the tangled stems of roses. The lighting was dark and he smelled some incense, a little strong for his taste but lending to the already prominent sensation of intoxication. As he washed his hands he dared to meet his own eye in the mirror and saw a man he didn’t recognize: flushed and exhilarated, a little unsteady, the trembling part of his lips showing her soft bites. He saw blood on his shoulder and startled before realizing it was her lipstick smeared against the ridge of his clavicle. 

As he dried his hands, he saw they were faintly shaking.

_ Not again,  _ he thought a little dizzily. He felt unprepared and yet drawn irresistibly back from the bathroom to the large, warm bed where she lay, dappled with sunlight, her skin so pale she nearly glowed. 

She gave him a smile that was softer than the fishnet stockings and dark eyeshadow would suggest it should be. He saw the girl beneath the woman, tender and daring to trust. “You’re trying to catch your balance.”

It unnerved him, the way she plucked his thoughts from his head like berries from a ripe bush. “This… is something different for me,” he replied honestly. He had dressed as soon as they were done, and he was grateful for it now as he tucked his hands in his slacks. 

Heather sat up slowly, blinking, looking like a drowsy housecat in the beam of early dawn piercing through her sheer curtains. “It frightens you to feel this way about me.”

Grissom watched her closely. She saw much, but so did he: the shy way she bowed her shoulders, keeping her breasts from pressing up; the way she met his eye defiantly, as though expecting him to shame her. “And what way is that?”

“Like I could know you,” Heather ventured boldly, “and I’m... someone you could care about.”

For the first time since he arrived at her home, Grissom couldn’t bring himself to meet her eye. “It does frighten me,” he agreed softly, feeling like he was baring his throat to a tiger. He found himself memorizing the rippled, melted shape of her silver lamp. It fit her perfectly in its imperfection. “I don’t know why.”

“You are afraid to let anyone too close. To fall in love, or let somebody love you. You’re too afraid of what will happen if you have to let them go.” 

Grissom did look at her then, her cat’s eyes, their green so dark in the morning light they were nearly black, the gentle slope of her cheekbones. She was luminous. “I suppose it feels easier to push people away.”

“Tell me,” said Heather, rising gracefully and crossing the room to stand before him, smelling of her floral perfume and the sex they’d had only a few minutes ago, “does it make it hurt any less when the people you love leave you?”

Grissom recoiled slightly before he could stop himself, worrying for a brief, irrational moment that Heather really  _ was  _ psychic; that she knew, somehow, about him, about his history and his heart, about the plant he’d bought over the phone, about Sara’s sad eyes as he begged her to stay. And she had stayed. Grissom felt the shock of it all over again: the stunning, knee-buckling relief, the furious gratitude. She  _ had  _ stayed, though he’d given her nothing, though he’d bargained with a bluff hand. She had  _ stayed. _

Grissom wondered if it was Sara’s staying that gave him the strength to do this: to have Heather. Not because Sara was there to fall back on - he wasn’t convinced she was, and anyways, that was not how he nursed a broken heart or repaired a damaged ego - but more that Sara’s love had fed him, had fortified the structures of his soul. And it  _ was _ love that had kept her in Las Vegas. He knew that. He wasn’t an idiot. 

And it was love, or some permutation of it, that had him asking her to stay. And it was love, or some approximation of it, that had him here with Heather, sinking into her sea-green eyes, into her smooth, yielding body, soft where Sara was sharp. Heather, who understood him like he was a language she’d spoken since birth; Heather, whose mind was a jewel that caught the sunlight at all angles. Heather, who was somebody he could care about. 

Heather’s small hand against his face shocked him back to the present. “Where did you go?”

Grissom only shook his head, gazing down at her warmly. “Around you, it seems I can’t even predict my own mind.”

Heather smiled. “Dr. Grissom, would you care for tea?”

~*~

_ Three Months Earlier _

He heard her laughter, sharp and staccato and a little bit wild, something he’d know anywhere, though the sound was muddied and underwater like everything else these days. He wondered if it was the last time he’d ever hear it. That’s how he counted things lately: a series of potential lasts. 

She was standing by the fire truck, looking at her toes, her ponytail laced through the opening in the back of her CSI issue ball cap. He could see, even at this distance, that she was blushing - or maybe it was only his imagination, embellishing the image. She was wearing her CSI windbreaker, her camera dangling around her neck, looking skinny and coltish and sweet enough to make his tooth ache. It was his favorite way of her being: unselfconscious and a little too earnest and brimming with that barely-suppressed joy that always shivered along his skin like a static charge if he got too close.

The man was standing in front of her, gesturing, and his voice didn't carry at all, not to Grissom’s gossamer ears. He was tall and dark-haired and young, and there was that characteristic buoyant happiness in his face that spoke of falling in love.

Grissom tapped his fingertips together. “Sara.”

She turned sharply, her face blank with shock as she saw him across the lawn.

“If you could finish processing the backyard, that’d be great.”

She nodded, and an awkward beat passed as she clearly expected him to censure her. For what? Having unprofessional contact at a crime scene? It  _ was _ worthy of his reprimand, but he knew it wouldn't be that he was reprimanding her for, not really, so he said nothing, only turning back towards the house. And some small, hard knot in the middle of him knew that this - his calm acceptance, his indifference - was better punishment than anything he could think to say.

Grissom stepped through the french doors into the living room, carefully skirting the pools of blood. Touched two fingertips to his carotid pulse and shook out his watch.

104 beats per minute.

Sara started in on fumbling, useless apologies as soon as they were in the car on the way back to lab, and Grissom felt like he was dying of heatstroke as they waited at a red light, every word out of her mouth a degree of temperature rising.

“And anyways… I know it was, um, unprofessional - and really, we’re not, we’re not even serious - we just, you know, hang out -”

Her ridiculous rationalization sent a bolt of rage through Grissom that had him tightening his hands dangerously on the steering wheel. The light finally, finally turned green. “Sara, you have nothing to apologize for. I’m happy for you. He seemed like a nice guy.”

As he suspected, Sara took this statement in tense silence. He could feel her chewing on it, feel her anger and her sadness burning at his eyes like steam off a pot. “He is nice,” she said finally, her voice so low he didn’t understand how he could hear it - but he could; he had never, for some reason he could not fathom, missed a word Sara had ever spoken to him. “He likes me a lot, Grissom. He likes to spend time with me. He’s always telling me how smart I am.” Grissom consciously relaxed his hands on the steering wheel as he turned onto the freeway, checking over his shoulder to merge. “He tells me that I’m beautiful.” Grissom braked a little too hard; the car behind him honked. “He tells me that he’s proud to be with me.” A long pause. She clearly expected him to respond, but what could he possibly say? “He makes me feel good, Grissom. Like I’m special. Like I’m worth it.”

Grissom felt his heart pulsing against his temples, and took a few measured breaths, hoping to stave off a migraine. There was a cramping pain, very sudden and very intense, located somewhere between the lobes of his lungs. “I think that’s great, Sara,” Grissom said. He was pleased with his voice, calm and cool and a little bit sarcastic. “I’ve been waiting for you to settle in and make Las Vegas your home.”

He didn’t bother to look over and see her reaction. He already knew what it would be. By the time they’d pulled into the garage below the lab, she could no longer hide her tears, wiping at her eyes with her sleeves like an angry child. 

Grissom put the car in park. She needed to know this. She needed to understand that this - this thing between them was over. That he was done with it. His ears started to hum, sounds fading away - the engine, the air conditioning vents overhead - but for some reason her sniffling was preserved, suddenly too loud in the absence of other sound. The pain in his chest returned, stronger than before. “I’m sorry,” Grissom said. He wasn’t sure if he meant it. He heard her blow a slow, shaky breath, clearly trying not to sob, and it made him realize he  _ did  _ mean it, that his anger wasn’t worth her pain. He reached over the gear shift and pulled her limp hand into his, threading their fingers together. “Sara, I’m sorry.”

“I thought you wanted me to move on. I thought you didn’t want me to be in love with you anymore.” She spoke to the passenger window, and his eyes were drawn to her reflection involuntarily, finding it wavering and strange, her eyes a shaky smear of colors.

_ I don’t know what I want,  _ Grissom thought, and he almost said it, but it seemed too much in the stifling close space of the car. He felt a sudden, desperate need to escape. “Let’s get inside,” he said.

Sara dropped his hand like it was a food wrapper she’d clean up later. “Yeah,” she said dully. “Let’s.”

~*~

_ Silence is all we dread. _

Grissom never thought of life after he lost his hearing. It was a vast, incomprehensible echo, like thinking about what existed before the Big Bang. The pulling pressure of a vacuum without light or sound. Unfathomable. The deep dark that had no bottom.

In the soft hours of the morning, Grissom would step into his bedroom and close the door. He lined a towel along the crack in the bottom. He turned off his air conditioning. Finally he pulled shut his blackout curtains. The room was plunged into darkness. Grissom did not go to sleep, though he was very tired. He would instead stand in the middle of the room for the long minutes it took his eyes to adjust, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. He felt his consciousness melt outward into empty space. He felt himself dissolve. Where before there had been him, there was now only silence.

He had been thinking, lately, about going somewhere. A trip, a sabbatical. He did not think about where he would go, he thought only of leaving, of being gone. Disappearance, like a body left out in the desert. Untraceable. 

Sara dusted for prints along the checkered black and white tiles of the victim’s kitchen counter. Grissom snapped a photo. “Were you really going to join the FBI?”

She paused, her brush poised like an artist caught for a candid photo. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

At first, his thoughts of leaving had been occasional, as occasional as the humming in his ears. Lately they were more frequent. He thought of it every day, of escape, of peace. An end to the exhausting meaninglessness of all of… this. 

The thoughts were beginning to worry him. 

“You didn’t know. You were ready to just get away, to be anywhere. See where you ended up.” He flicked through the photos on his camera, checking his angles. 

Sara resumed dusting. “Something like that. Sometimes I just feel like I can’t bear to stand still anymore. Why do you ask?”

He didn’t answer her. “Why did you stay?” he asked instead.

She turned to stare at him. He  _ knew  _ why, of course, and yet he didn’t, not anymore. Not with this itching restlessness in his skin. What was she surviving on, he meant to ask. How did she endure? “I guess I decided I didn’t want to spend my whole life drifting from place to place like a ghost.”

Grissom looked at her. She was vaporish, now that he thought about it. Atmospheric. Her skin was translucent: he could see her bones and sinews, see the blood pulsing through the elaborate network of veins and capillaries. She floated an inch off the floor, she brushed the counter without contact, touchless, untouching. “I see,” he said, and meant it. 

Sara bit her lip, thinking. “You want to go somewhere else?”

He shifted his jaw. Stared out past her shoulder, through the window that faced the alley, the trash cans overfull with garbage, the flyers peeling off the neighbor’s fence. “Sometimes I want to disappear.”

It was very likely the most honest thing he had ever said to her. One of the more honest things he’d ever said to anyone, in fact. He didn’t like it. He felt like he was a boy again, kneeling before a priest. Weak. Sinful. “I see,” she said, parroting him. She had changed, become real, become as solid and human as anyone he’d ever seen. She didn’t look at him, and he was glad. He wondered what penance she would assign, how she would bind him, how she would drag him back to earth. “I would miss you.”

He closed his eyes briefly. 

Penance, penance. She led him down, unbound.

~*~

He waited in his car for an hour in the rain outside of Heather’s house. This time gave him an opportunity to think. He contemplated the past six months: his failing hearing, Philip Gerard’s betrayal and witch-hunt, Sara’s cool confrontation at his “confusing” reaction to her getting a life. All of which culminated in his waiting in his idling Denali outside the sprawling suburban home of a dominatrix, nursing a broken heart and repairing a damaged ego.

Heather understood him, Grissom reflected, rather too well. She saw his reporting her to Brass for what it was: a maneuver to push her away. And she had no interest in playing cat and mouse with a man who would follow each gesture of love with an act of betrayal. 

Grissom was afraid of being alone. He was afraid of silence and old age and a slow dissolution towards death. He knew that if he went to Heather and acknowledged his wrongs, she would grant him forgiveness, though she would demand penance. A plant would not suffice. She would tell him that in order for her to be his he must also be hers, but in the warm cocoon of her home, it would seem a cheap price to pay. The only thing standing between him and that acceptance and understanding was the handle of the driver’s side door. 

Grissom did not open the door.

He was not entirely sure why he did not open the door, not then and not later, either. At the time he would say to himself it was because he knew she would not forgive him, though he would realize, even as he thought the words, that it was a lie. In his heart he would guess it was because he knew she  _ would  _ forgive him. Later, he would wonder if it was because on some deep, unspoken level he knew - even then, even though he hated it, even though it frightened him more than deafness and more than death - he knew that he could not be Heather’s because he was already somebody else’s. 

Grissom drove home in the rain, back to his empty townhouse. He fell asleep on his couch and dreamt of Sara and woke on the desperate edge of orgasm, gasping, fighting against it. His hand went reflexively to his erection beneath his slacks to squeeze and try to stave it off but it was useless, the ghost-memory of his dream still fresh in his mind - her tears, her lips on the pulse of his throat, her tight delicious cunt - and he’s gushing and gushing into his pants, hips drawn up off the couch, grimacing.  _ Fuck.  _

After he stripped off his pants and underwear, he resisted the urge to cross himself. 

_ Sins of the flesh.  _

~*~

The surgeon explained the procedure, pointing to the diagram of an ear with a latex gloved finger. The surgeon wasn’t really looking at Grissom, which was helpful, because Grissom wasn’t really listening.

He was too busy running that bizarre conversation with Sara back and forth through his brain, the fingers of his thoughts - also latex gloved - turning it over and over, touching each surface and each sharp edge, examining from all angles. He had that awful pain in his chest again, his feelings knotted somewhere between intense annoyance and nauseating despair. 

Dinner. Dinner! And to ask so boldly, like he was some skinny ankled boy who’d been serving her a veggie burger at the diner they all liked to eat at.  _ By the way, maybe we should grab a bite sometime.  _ She might as well have written her question on a post it note and slid it under his door. She was acting as if he hadn’t already been inside her, tasted the sweat beading on the hollow of her throat, moved her to Las Vegas with a ten minute phone call. ‘Let’s see where it goes,’ she had said, like maybe things might not work out, like she’d order a salad and he’d order a sandwich and at the end of the night they’d both laugh off the awkwardness and say, whoops, wasn’t meant to be, but at least we’re still friends. Like dinner wouldn’t be the first breeze of a hurricane, like it wouldn’t be the rest of his life, like there was any statistically significant probability of him  _ not  _ falling hopelessly in love with her. Like they weren’t, for that matter,  _ already  _ hopelessly in love. 

Grissom was about 80% sure he was listed as her emergency contact on her employment forms.

Driving home from the surgical consult, Grissom felt his outrage fading like his hearing, leaving behind a molasses of sorrow and regret. He spent too long cleaning his townhouse, trying to distract himself in the rhythmic sway of his broom and then his mop, in the folding of his sheets, in the churn of the dishwasher. He felt at once agitated and immobilized.

He did not know why he had rejected her so harshly. He might have said something, he might have explained. He might have at least been kind. 

But now it was, as she had so aptly pointed out, too late. 

_ Forgive me,  _ he thought heavily, rubbing at his eyes in an exhaustion so complete he thought he might disappear beneath it,  _ forgive me, for I have sinned… _

Grissom thought again of his sabbatical, the promised land of tolerance. He did not want to die but a part of him was afraid he was already halfway there. He would have the surgery, he decided, and he almost looked forward to it, to slipping backwards into the deep black that had no bottom as the nurse pushed in the anesthetic, alone in a scratchy robe in a big room with bright lights, as alone as he’d ever been and yet no lonelier than this, this moment, sitting on his couch, trying to guess what Sara thought she knew about  _ what to do about this.  _

He really didn’t want to die, he realized with some horror. He didn’t want Heather. He didn’t want to go deaf. Grissom leaned his head back on his couch cushion, pressing his fingers down into his eyes until stars burst across his vision.

Life would be so much less painful if he had not fallen in love. 

The words he didn’t say to her circled around his brain, relentless, cyclical. He could write poems of his regret. Instead he wrote a letter: crumpled the first one, and the second, and the third. The fourth was two pages long with tiny black lettering dense enough to cause a headache. It started as an explanation and morphed into an apology and ended up something else altogether. Maybe he did know what to do about this, after all. Maybe he did know what he wanted and not only what he didn’t want. A confession, from the first pen stroke to the last. How to tell a girl you’re sorry in 1,000 words or less. 

This was his penance: a love letter she’ll never read. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Season 3 is one of G-man's low points. He is very afraid of losing his hearing, and he has seemingly lost Sara and their quasi-relationship, which in my estimation was more important to him than he ever let on. He is let down by his mentor, Philip Gerard, and begins to see the fallacy of total impartiality in his work without the temperance of love and humanness. He sees an opportunity to better understand himself and be less alone with Heather, but fumbles it immediately in his compulsion to push away anybody who gets close and always prioritize his work over the people he cares about. A good thing for him, in the end, since I don't think Heather was a better match than Sara - Heather made him think, but she never made him feel. The season ends with him echoing his failure with Heather in his failure with Sara, firmly rebuffing her asking him on a date. Losing Heather means only losing a possibility, one he can put out of his mind in a short time. But pushing away Sara, who he will still have to see every day, whose heartbreak he will have to witness first hand, who will continually remind him of a life he could be living, is much more real.


	6. Mind the Gap

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sara's POV through Season 4. Involves specific references to ep 3, called Homebodies, and Butterflied.

~*~

A therapist she saw as a teenager told her that she had dissociated the memories of her trauma. The therapist explained very calmly that when a person is faced with something too awful to process, they push their awareness away, disembody themselves as a last, desperate defense against utter destruction. But until they learned to bring the memories back inside themselves, to blend them in with the watercolor of their life, the memories would haunt them, apart but always present, like a poltergeist.

Sara had never believed that last part. That somehow going back to the dark house would help her in any way. Years she had spent there, trapped, friendless, dreaming of rescue. She would not go back.

Sara is now beginning to see that it was not a matter of going back: it was a matter of never having left. There was a girl-ghost inside of her, a self of the self who wandered the dim hallways of the home of her memory, weeping, listening to her mother’s thin wails, counting her father’s dying breaths. She stayed in the house and she never left.

She stayed so Sara didn’t have to.

Sara feels her cool tears drying on her cheeks as she watches Grissom process Susanna’s body. There is a hard, aching pit of sorrow so deep inside her it seems like it reaches straight down into her soul, that it is as old as she is, maybe older. Susanna, who had done everything right: who had parents that loved her, who bravely faced her rapist, who believed Sara when she told the girl she was doing the right thing.

Grissom looks emotionless as he carefully tweezes fibers off Susanna’s motionless body. Sara doesn’t blame him; figures the void of sadness inside of her is big enough for both of them, and she anyways she wonders if Grissom has dissociated, too, if Sara herself is his bad memory, locked away in the car for safekeeping. 

Susanna’s story, Sara reflects with an eerie sense of calm, is at least over. Had Susanna lived, she would have found, Sara is certain, that only part of her survived: that there was a piece of her forever in her parent’s bedroom, a man’s teeth chewing the flesh of her shoulder, another man’s breath boiling over her face, her father’s body thumping against the closet door. A child, pinned and helpless, who never got back up off the bed. But Susanna, laid out not breathing on her parent’s driveway, has no ghosts: she is only her dead self, unseparate and whole. 

Maybe it’s easier, Sara thinks. To have nothing, then to have such pain. 

~*~

Hank still calls her, sometimes. She never answers. He leaves soft voicemails desperate to hear from her, and she plays them each once before deleting. She’s not sure what she feels about him anymore. It used to be pain, but now it’s something else, or maybe nothing else - maybe nothing at all.

Sara wonders who leaves begging voicemails on Grissom’s answering machine. She’s heard about the dominatrix, although not much, some conspiracy of silence that hushes voices as soon as she walks in the room. Sara had overheard Catherine saying to Grissom once, “she really is so right for you. Smart, cool, composed. A woman who’s always in control. Just your type.”

Catherine hadn’t seen Sara pouring coffee behind her - or maybe she had, and didn’t think Sara would care. Or didn’t care if Sara  _ did  _ care. Whatever it was, Catherine had said it, and Sara had turned to see Grissom leaning back his head to stare at his long-time friend with a look of total remoteness and detachment, like Catherine was an insect who had pupated earlier than expected. “That’s not my type,” Grissom had said, not looking at Sara.

Catherine had planted her hands on her hips. “Then what  _ is  _ your type?”

Sara sipped at her steaming mug of coffee, watching the dark liquid swirling around as she stirred it, wishing she could evaporate from the room or slip invisibly through the doorway. But she remained where she was. 

“My type,” Grissom said, in his calm, professorial tone, “is somebody who makes me feel human.”

This was a classically vague Grissom answer, and Catherine sighed, and Sara imagined the woman rolling her eyes as she strode impatiently out of the break room. Grissom lingered like a bad spirit, and Sara could feel his eyes pressing into the crown of her head as she stared down into her cup of coffee.

She did not look up. 

“Sara…”

His voice was regretful, too soft. Pitying. And of course he felt bad for her - pathetic, lonesome Sara, lovesick puppy who can’t move on. Sara felt rage boiling into her throat, but she knew the rage was thin, a hot vaporish steam rising off the waters of utter heartbreak beneath. “Don’t,” Sara said sharply, hoping she sounded calm and knowing she did not, “It’s fine, Grissom.” She wrenched her eyes up and forced them to Grissom’s face. “You deserve to have a life.”

She wondered how she had looked as he had said those same words to her, not quite one year ago: she imagined her expression might mirror his now, the look of incredulity, of quiet outrage. Sara feels her anger thicken. He was looking at Sara as though her jealousy was a given, as certain as the sunrise. As though by denying her jealousy Sara was taking from him something that was his. As though her love was his to keep regardless of whether he gave her an atom of affection in return. 

He looked like he was working his way up to saying something, and Sara was sure it was something she did not want to hear. She was out the door before he could speak, grateful, for once, that it was so hard for him to find his words.

And so Sara imagined it was Heather, perhaps, who left voicemails on Grissom’s machine, but Sara imagines they are not begging, that Heather is too good to beg. Maybe it is Grissom who begs her. Maybe they are just a sad triangle of longing, Grissom longing for Heather as much as Sara longed for him. 

Sara tries to decide if she finds that more funny or sad as she deletes Hank’s latest message -  _ hey, uh, hey. It’s me, Sara. Hank. Just calling to say…  _ \- and she startles a little as the phone rings.

“Sidle,” she mumbles into the mouthpiece, straightening the journals she’s got piled by her phone.

“Hey,” Grissom greets, “are you busy? I know you just got home. The warrant on our perp just came through. I can come pick you up in ten minutes if you want to come for the arrest.”

Sara breathes out slowly through her nose. She gazes listlessly around her dark, empty apartment. Grissom phrases it as a request, but she imagines he’s already on his way over, so certain is he of her answer. “No,” she says, wondering if that’s actually her that’s speaking, finding her voice distant and strange. “No, I’ll pass. Fill me in tomorrow.”

A long pause. “I - okay. Is… everything alright, Sara?”

“Everything is fine, Grissom.” Sara picks a piece of lint off her shirt. “Maybe I’m just realizing I deserve to have a life, too.”

~*~

He doesn’t even smell like sweat, only like the chemicals he’d used to search for blood over every centimeter of Debbie Marlin’s apartment. 

She’s got him up against his car door, and it feels a little like an assault, the way his fingers move weakly against her shoulders, almost pleading, the way he is leaning back as far away from her as he can get. But whatever power he usually has to keep her at bay is gone, tapped out, exhausted, so she’s cornered him, and she kisses him not as an act of love but an act of rage. His lips are soft and his beard is wiry where it scratches against her face, his tongue is hot and sinful as he presses it into her mouth. She thinks,  _ I hate him,  _ and bites his lower lip until the tinny taste of his blood explodes into the kiss, making it even wetter and warmer. She lets his blood wash into her mouth, coating her teeth. He doesn’t make any sign of the pain he must’ve felt, but she soothes her tongue along the weeping gash anyways, not sorry to have hurt him but not wanting him to keep hurting. If that made any sense.

Sara knows it doesn’t.

She breaks away from Grissom’s mouth abruptly, smearing the back of her hand over her lips, not knowing or caring that it streaks the blood from his lip across her cheeks, making her look wild, cannibalistic. She thought she’d lost the taste for meat but his skin had been delicious breaking under her teeth.

Grissom stays where she left him, head leaning against his car, watching her from under hooded eyes. Blood is dribbling down his chin. She sees his chest rising and falling with heavy breaths. 

“I  _ loved  _ you,” she says to him, sharp and so angry she is afraid what she might do if she doesn’t speak, if she doesn’t give voice to this feeling. “You threw it away.”

She watches his throat undulate with his swallow. “I know,” he whispers, closing his eyes. His lip is swelling. He makes no move to wipe the blood off his face. “I know.”

~*~

Back in her apartment, Sara falls asleep on the couch, the Marlin casefile open on her lap. 

She dreams of the dark house. She’s in her room, small, the ceiling slanted: the room with the broken lock. Below, she hears her father’s creaking footsteps.

He is carrying her down the stairs now, and the fabric of his shirt against her mouth is familiar, the holes by the seam she can stick her small fingers through. His smell of beer and sweat and dad. He sets her down on the counter, the tiles cool under her thighs.

“You left me,” she says in her small girl voice.

He is fixing himself a drink. If it were a memory of something that really happened, he might tell her she was being a whiny bitch, or he might weep with remorse. In her dreams, he manages to hate her and love her with the same look in his brown eyes, somehow capturing the truth of the story better than reality ever had. “I love you, Sar,” he says, in that voice she only knows in dreams, “but I can’t be with you.”

“You hurt me,” she says. It is true: he had hurt her with his words and his fists and most of all with his death, carving a hole in the bones of her ribs that sunk right down into the quick of her. “You died.”

“I’m not dead,” says daddy, shaking his head at her. “I’m here in the house where you left me.”

She remembers closing the front door, leaving his body cooling on the kitchen floor. The blood sticking her fingers together. “I’m sorry,” she says. 

If Sara’s dreams had been wishes, daddy would have turned, his eyes meeting her eyes, and he would have said something to her - maybe nothing kind, but something that felt like he knew her, like she was worth living for. But Sara’s dreams were too honest for that.

Daddy only took another drink.

Sara didn’t hear Dr. Lurie step up behind her; she only felt the cut of the cold blade parting the skin of her neck like a smile, and the hot blood gushing out. Dr. Lurie folds her on the kitchen tiles, tilts her head towards daddy, her arms straight alongside her bent knees like a puppet with cut strings. She looks at daddy’s face, tall and solemn and grey as it had been that day he lay unmoving on the kitchen floor. 

She thinks he might look a little sad, but she couldn’t be sure.

~*~

She doesn’t really want the key position.

Maybe she does.

Sara throws back a shot of tequila as she logs onto her computer. Like her father, she always drinks out of a nice glass. It’s funny, the little things broken people hang onto, the little rituals, small shreds of hope clinging like static, at least I’m not as bad as that, at least, at least, at least…

Sara opens the email containing her plane tickets. New York City. She’s never been. She looks at her aisle and her seat number and she thinks of his face: his tired, heartbroken face, his chin to his chest, Dr Lurie slithering out the door like a rattlesnake into the dust, leaving Grissom behind, snakebit and dying in pain. 

She’s felt that kind of hurt before, she thinks. Her life has been hard but not fatal and she’s kept on living. She doesn’t owe him anything and she knows he’ll survive the agony of being left. 

She deletes the tickets anyway.

~*~

She hadn’t been lying to Nick and Hodges: unable to sleep, Sara drifted into her living room, pale and ghoulish in the dim glow of the street lights bleeding through the curtains. She pulls the entomology textbook Grissom got her that Christmas off the shelf. It is, purely on its own merits, the most somniferous book she has ever owned.

But she can’t judge it only on the technical description of insect physiology and mating habits; she must also consider the blue ink notes written in tiny neat lettering over every single one of its 495 pages. How long had it taken Grissom to annotate the volume? A year and a half, one page a day? Had it been with her in mind, or had he given her this tome on impulse, wanting her to take up one of his hobbies?

He had found her in the locker room in late December, the book tucked under his arm, wrapped expertly in newspaper, tiny squares of tape holding the wrapping in place. He’d begun gathering his things to leave, acting as though he were there merely by coincidence, and Sara had tossed a light farewell his way as she made her way to the door. He’d stopped her with her name, still facing his locker. He’d given her a gift every year since she’d come to Las Vegas, but only the first one had been in person, at the Christmas party where he’d danced with her and smiled at her and laughed with her like they were falling in love. 

“This is for you,” Grissom had said to his locker, and Sara only assumed he was meaning to address her when he extended the package towards her without looking.

Sara took it slowly, turning it in her hands, seeing that the sheets of newspaper were all finished crossword puzzles. He must have saved them for her gift. Or maybe he always saved them, and only used them now to avoid being wasteful. “Thank you.”

He was still standing there, lifting and dropping the latch of his locker door, looking just to the right of her, like he was waiting for someone else. 

Sara realized he expected her to open the gift. She carefully pulled the tape loose, not damaging his crosswords - she wasn’t sure what she would do with them, but she knew with her wordless Grissom-sense that he would be hurt if she ruined them, that in giving her his crosswords he was giving her some small, precious piece of himself - and Sara looked at the hardcover text underneath it. “Entomology. Since I was asking you to walk me through your regression?”

He nodded once. He looked tense, almost unhappy, the same way he looked when the evidence in a case wasn’t adding up. “I - you don’t have to read it. I mean, it’s dry. But I thought…” He trailed off. What had he thought? Did he even know? Certainly Sara couldn’t guess. 

“Thank you,” she said again. She looked at him as he looked at his toes. She could reach out to him in this moment, she knew. He would be receptive - he was inviting her to do so, in his own aloof way. Sara wondered what he would do if she stepped up and kissed him. She had a very strong sense that he would take her in his arms and devour her but a moment later he would pull away, push her back, speechless and shocked at himself. Perhaps he had noticed the distance between them since he had rejected her. He wanted her love, Sara understood that now. But he did not want to love her. “I’m sure I’ll love it,” Sara continued, not moving towards him. “Your gifts are always perfect.”

He had shifted his jaw at her praise, pressing his mouth, his look of unhappiness deepening, but Sara wondered if it wasn’t really unhappiness at all, only some kind of tension, some dissonance inside him, like he was being pulled in two directions at once. His ears were turning red. He opened his mouth to speak, glancing at her briefly before his eyes roamed uneasily around the room, but whatever words he had hoped for wouldn’t come, and Sara left him standing there in the locker room, too weary and heartsore to wait him out. 

As she looks through the book, she sees his notes are vast and varied, everything from corrections on technical inaccuracies to expansions in detail to little sketches to personal anecdotes and, her favorite all, utterly awful bug-related jokes. 

She is three chapters in. Turning the page, she spies in the upper right hand corner above a sketch of a horrifyingly enlarged wasp, 

_ Sara -  _

_ remember case at forensics conference last year (2003)? Saw this specimen on tree in woods on our walk before we stumbled upon The Burning Body... _

It takes her ten or fifteen minutes to stop smiling, though she keeps wiping at her mouth like she can clean the grin off her lips. Flipping through, she looks for other notes addressed to her by name:

_ Sara,  _ another reads,  _ not sure why author lists this species’ larvae sacks as venomous - multiple studies show no support for this - often confused with other genus of moth with venomous larvae. _

_ Sara,  _ she sees on page 342,  _ there is a 1978 film called The Swarm about this particular type of bee, considered one of the worst films ever made. Michael Caine in his younger years.  _ Sara squints, raising the book closer to her face; next to this last sentence is a blotch of ink which she realizes, upon inspection, was Grissom having crossed something out. She sees the edge of a  _ w _ and knows with an aching, heart hurting certainty that he had begun to write,  _ we should watch it together.  _

Sara closes the textbook and sets it aside. Pretends to sleep. 

~*~

Sara watches her vomit splatter the gardenia bush on the side of the building. She’d eaten a hard boiled egg for breakfast and smells the rubbery white in her stomach acid.

She hears him behind her, muttering to Brass,  _ give me thirty minutes.  _

Thirty minutes seems like a long time. Sara straightens, coughing, wiping the wetness from her eyes.

It isn’t the hangover. She almost wishes it was, knows Brass thinks it is. It isn’t that: it was the smell of the vic’s congealed blood, and maybe the glossy brown of his dead eyes, and maybe the thought that had echoed so loud and so unwelcome in her mind as she looked down the husband and daughter bled out on the kitchen floor, blood-soaked wife catatonic in the back of the squad car:  _ I wish my mother had killed me too.  _

She only notices she’s shivering when Grissom wraps his jacket around her shoulders. 

“Come on,” he says, holding the jacket onto her body with his palms around her upper arms, “let’s take a walk.”

He guides her with one arm around her waist and the other holding her hand like he’s leading a blind person. He takes her two or three blocks, and she’s wondering where they’re going, if they’re going anywhere, walking in silence through the cool pre-dawn hours, awake before the mosquitoes.

She is surprised when he guides her to a man-made pond, smelling of geese droppings and wet leaves. It’s empty, of course, and he stops them between two sycamore trees and says, “sit.”

Sara sighs. Sits.

If she was surprised before, she’s stunned to feel him sit behind her, to feel the warmth of his thighs bracketing hers, the sturdy heat of his chest against her shoulderblades. Without meaning to, she memorizes the rhythm of his breathing. 

Without meaning to,  _ without  _ meaning to, she starts to cry.

He doesn’t really do anything, or at least not much, just his arms across her arms, pulling her in tight. She’s the one who turns and burrows into the hot skin of his neck, wetting it with her tears, knotting her fingers into the downy hairs at the base of his skull. 

Flashes of memory are exploding behind her eyelids like fireworks - sparklers, maybe, the stuff people shoot off in their driveways, loud and too bright. Her father’s wet, heavy breaths as he died on the kitchen floor slowly. Her mother’s wails - low, trembling sounds, inhuman, a keening kind of groan that shivered through Sara’s bones. Mother had collapsed by the front door and crouched there until the police came, groaning and groaning. Daddy had stumbled around the counter, a pulpy red slime of flesh and blood following his steps like a bridal train before he slumped to the ground a few feet from the hallway that led to her bedroom. She’d come out, thinking the fight had ended. And it had.

Sara had been the last thing Daddy had sought. He had looked at her face as he died, not saying anything. He was very pale, struggling to breath, his hand splayed over his chest like he was holding his heart in place. He had reached his other hand towards her, his eyes wild with fear. She had stepped away. She would remember that and regret it for the rest of her life - that one childish impulse, that surrender to her horror - her daddy had been bleeding to death and wanted to touch her, to say goodbye, perhaps, or at least have her near, and she had stepped away. 

Sara is shaking all over. Grissom squashes her to his body with a fraction of his full strength - he’s more powerfully built than one might guess - and he’s bigger and stronger and warmer than her, he’s perfect, he’s home. She presses her face into the join of his neck and shoulder, pressing the memories out, pressing out the past. 

“Sara,” he says, smoothing her tear-wet hair off the side of her face, “tell me. Please, tell me.”

She pushes herself upright, palms braced flat against his chest, feeling heavier than the world. Sara shakes her head. “I can’t.”

They sit with one another in her refusal for a moment, aligned in their misery. Alone, together. “I’m taking you off this case,” he says.

She nods. Wonders if she should stand, but he tugs her close to him again, her body folded against his, her face cocooned in the smooth material of his CSI jacket, and then she detects a slight side-to-side motion like the sway of the sea, and she realizes he is rocking her like a baby.

_ He’ll never let me go,  _ she realizes, and the terror of it has her sobbing into his shoulder all over again.  _ Even if I lose my mind, even if it’s killing me to stay here, he’ll never, ever let me go, not even if I cut him open and leave him bleeding to death on the kitchen floor, not ever, not ever, not ever…  _

They’re gone a lot longer than thirty minutes.

  
  


~*~

She’s still a little drunk as he drives her home; he’d picked her up quickly, so she was only in the station for thirty minutes, maybe an hour. Some of the drunkenness might be wishful thinking. She doesn’t want to be sober for this.

Thank god he doesn’t talk, just drives, slow and cautious, always using his turn indicators. Grissom is never reckless. Grissom is never a fool. She wonders if that takes deliberate work on his part - if he has to expend considerable energy and practice towards his flawless composure and wise restraint - or if it was just another one of those things that normal people learn growing up, like how to do their own laundry, or how often to drink water, or how to have somebody you love love you in return. 

Sara hadn’t known how to buy a pair of shoes that fit until her third year of college. 

As he parks, she tries to get out the door quickly, mumbling her thanks over her shoulder and slipping out the passenger door like a shadow in the shifting sun. She has to double back when she remembers her work bag is in his backseat, but no matter: he’s got it slung over his shoulder, blinking at her guilelessly, clearly intending to follow her up. 

Why? To lecture her? Fire her? Make sure she doesn’t slit her wrists?

They still don’t speak, even now that they’re inside, Grissom seeming much too large for her small dark home, like he’s going to be elbowing furniture and breaking vases. Except he’s Grissom, so he folds himself neatly into a corner of her living room and stares at her.

“I’m not firing you,” he says.

In the heavy silence that had accumulated between them, his voice cracks like a stone. Sara flops onto her couch. “You should have let me leave two years ago.”

She watches his reaction through lidded eyes, the investigator in her finding all his tells: his shoulders drawing up, his eyes skittering away, the slow, silent breath he exhales through his slightly open mouth. “Sara…” 

It is customary, she realizes, for her to speak up at this juncture, to save them both from the lingering, amorphous failure of his attempt to communicate that fills the room like a foul stench. Sara takes malicious pleasure in her silence, only staring at him with eyes she knows are cold and assessing. 

He sighs, leaning his head back slightly. “Are you hungry? I can cook something.”

Sara blinks. “I don’t… have any food in the house.”

Grissom winces, like he really wished she hadn’t said that. Sara wonders if it is one of those things normal people know not to say. She has gotten better, as an adult, at sensing what about her is odd and what about her is typical, but sometimes she still misses the mark and gives away too much. “Alright,” he says in a low voice, shaking his head slightly. “Well, come on. Let’s swing by a store and grab some food.”

Sara feels like she’s entered some kind of parallel dimension: a giddy, weightless feeling, sickening, the first drop on the rollercoaster. “What?”

He is already at the door, waiting impatiently. “Come on, Sara.”

As she trails behind him in the grocery store, Sara internally blames these past four years of following him around at crime scenes for leading her here. She hadn’t really agreed to his plan, only drifted out the door after him, Gil Grissom’s lanky shadow. 

He is paused in the freezer aisle, and she floats by his shoulder, following his gaze. “What kind of vegetarian stuff do you like?” He’s looking at the veggie sausages with a scientist’s scrutiny. 

“Morning Star is what I usually get.”

Grissom nods, extracting one package. He flips it over and begins evaluating it critically, his face gradually tightening into an expression of profound skepticism. “What the hell is this stuff even made of? ‘methylcellulose’? Sara,” he says, turning to regard her seriously, “this crap is all ultra-processed plant proteins and preservatives.” He puts the package back in the freezer. “Let’s find something else.”

Sara cannot bring herself to care; she cannot even bring herself to be amazed by Grissom’s bizarre transformation from aloof and disinterested employer to nagging grandmother. “I’ll go get some snacks,” she grunts, venturing away from him for the first time since entering the grocery store.

She finds him in the check out line a few minutes later, her arms loaded with doritos and sunflower seeds.  _ Go ahead and tell me what this shit is made out of,  _ she thinks darkly, but Grissom, seeing her pillage, only smirks. 

Back in her apartment, Grissom in her kitchen is an oddity on every level, not least because the space has never been used for real cooking. Watching it come to life with movement and heat and smell makes her feel like a guest in someone else’s house. He turns on the fan above the stove, and the long standing mystery of why there was a light switch on the back wall is finally solved. He makes her - them - vegetarian Bahn Mi sandwiches, and Sara isn’t too petty to admit that they’re delicious. He nibbles daintily on his half sandwich; she scarfs down the other one and a half, washing it back with some all-natural carbonated hippie drink he’d bought a six pack of. She wouldn’t have pegged him for a health food guy but it just goes to show what she knows. 

Sara uncoils herself in the wordless satisfaction of being well fed, fatigue close on its heels. She stretches out along her couch, feeling long limbed and boneless, feeling surprisingly unflustered by the love-of-her-life-cum-boss scrubbing the dishes in her sink. “Why are you doing this?” she calls, not necessarily loud enough for him to hear, more just asking it of the universe.

“Doing what?” he parries.

“Making food. Being here. I always thought the floor was lava for you in my apartment.”

She hears the clink of him putting her dishes away. “I guess I realized I haven’t been taking very good care of you, Sara.”

His answer meanders through her brain in slow, underwater time. Sara feels a lazy outrage rise up at the implication, and some other feeling as well, something she will not name. “I don’t need you,” she answers, her tone flat. She doesn’t know what he is doing, what he means by  _ taking care of her _ . She isn’t one of his little insects that he can feed and observe and put back on the shelf for another few years. “I can take care of myself. And anyways, what gives you the right?”

Grissom is quiet for a while, so Sara sits up enough to look over the arm of her couch. He’s wiping down her counters, expressionless, pausing to chip with his fingernail at something that had dried onto the grout. “I don’t know. But you’re not taking care of yourself, Sara.”

Sara sits up, anger burning her like a flame at her back. “Fuck off,” she snarls, and sees him look up at her in surprise. Sara swings her legs over and vaults up off the couch. She is tired of being below him. “This is such bullshit. You can’t just show up after four years saying you’re gonna be  _ taking care of me _ . I’m not a toy you can play with and then forget about, Grissom! This is - you don’t - you don’t respect me! You haven’t respected me as a person and now you don’t even respect me as a CSI. I work hard, Gris, and you know I’m good, you know my work is good. But you won’t - you refuse to even acknowledge that!”

Grissom gives his head one sharp shake, like he’s just seen something he can’t quite believe. “I  _ do _ respect you, Sara. You don’t have to…” He stops, sighing raggedly and deflating like a punctured tire. 

“To what?” she queries sharply.

Grissom looks at her for a moment, his mouth curling down at the edges like burnt paper as he then turns to stare sidelong out her small window. “You don’t have to defend yourself from me. Or try to earn my approval. Of  _ course  _ you’re an excellent criminalist, Sara. I…” He forces himself to meet her gaze again. His eyes are crisp blue and very tired. “Honey, I care about you so much. You’re - you’re so important to me. I hope this…” He waves his hand vaguely, “this promotion thing didn’t make you doubt that.”

Sara studies Grissom for the space of several seconds, not speaking, not planning to speak. Just looking. Just seeing him for the first time in a while. She has been trying not to look at his face these past many months, the same way you try not to move a broken limb. That ginger, fearful way of being, always anticipating the next technicolor burst of incredible pain. She is surprised to find as she gazes at the neat hair curling on his temples, at his symmetrical ears, at his straight nose and frowning mouth and soft, cautious eyes, that she feels nothing at all. 

Sara draws in a deep, even breath. “There’s a lot I don’t know about you, Grissom,” Sara says. She sees Grissom tilting his head, worrying this is a criticism, his face as afraid as if she was poised with a scalpel ready to cut him open from throat to pelvis so she can inspect his interior. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, either.”

He pauses, pursing his mouth. His eyes flash with interest - the investigator in him, that tireless bloodhound, cocks its head. “I’m sure that’s true,” he concedes. 

Seconds tick by. Sara rubs her hands over her face, feeling exhausted. 

“Maybe we should get to know each other, then.”

She peeks at him over her fingertips, can’t help her eyebrows creeping up her forehead. “I’m assuming that was a stress-induced auditory hallucination.”

His mouth hikes up on one side, a sloppy little grin that makes her heart pulse into her throat, a faint echo of the love she once felt for him. “I’m trying,” he explains with a shrug.

Sara examines her boss for a moment. He’s still so handsome, though he’s an older man then when she met him - a different man in many ways. Harder, sadder, quieter. His eyes still glow with that careful kindness that she first fell in love with; his mouth still trembles with the feelings he can’t voice. He’s the man she loves, but he’s not hers, he will never be hers, and she feels that the love has detached from her, floating without tether somewhere in her interior. 

“I don’t know, Gris,” Sara replies. Grissom tilts his head back, his eyes darkening as he looks at Sara uncertainly. “I’m sorry,” she says, and means it. “I think… I think it may be too late.”

Grissom is silent for a long, long stretch, a painful ache of several seconds, his eyes motionlessly fixed on her face. Grissom looks - he looks - “Too late,” he echoes softly.

Sara struggles not to cry. She feels overwhelmed with sadness: for herself, for Grissom, for them together, this strange sickly bloom of love they’d kept alive between them for years without sunlight or water, without touch, a spindly flower blossoming in the dark. But death, they both knew as scientists, was inevitable, and Sara realizes that Grissom will  _ never  _ declare it, he will keep up the resuscitation, he will not acknowledge that this thing between them is long withered and lifeless.

“I’m sorry,” Sara says again. 

Grissom’s face is vacant, completely hollow, only a statue of a man, an outer shell with nothing living inside. “Okay,” he says. 

Sara sighs harshly. 

“I’ll have to make a note on your file, Sara,” he continues, his tone flat and strangely hoarse. “But - but it won’t be - I’m not going to punish you. I’ll make a note, and I’ll have to assign some PEAP counseling, maybe, or something - I’ll think of something. It won’t be bad.”

Sara nods, crossing her arms over herself. 

Grissom clears his throat, looking over her shoulder towards the front door like it’s a gateway out of hell. “I’ll, uh, I’ll let you get some rest, then.”

“Sure,” Sara whispers. “See you tomorrow, Grissom.”

Grissom snakes past her, disappears without a word or a backwards glance. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ohhhhhh season four! The deep well of GSR super sadness. Hard to write from Sara's POV and convey how low she felt, how troubled she was, how useless/rejecting Grissom was being, but at same time, make it realistic for her to stay in Vegas and be ready to trust him next season without her seeming inconsistent or pathetic. So my headcanon is that Grissom was never quite as cold and distant as portrayed in the show, and some of their distance was due to Sara's distrust and inner turmoil, not just dear, emotionally constipated Gilbert's.


	7. I crown and miter you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follows Grissom's POV through season 5.
> 
> And yes, I looked up Cards Against Humanity winning sets on Pinterest.

~*~

Grissom wanted to stay here: Sara, drowsing, her feet in his lap, draped on his couch like a bolt of silk. He had a book of Longfellow in his hands, and as he read to her she gave that slow sly smile, her cheeks still too pale to resist a blush, and he loved her as he had loved her that first day he met her, he loved her as he loved her every time he’d seen her, with every word he spoke to her, he loved her more freshly than a breath of air, longingly, sorrowfully, with great joy and an unavoidable sadness. He had known happiness like this before, he  _ had _ \- a long, long time ago: the smell of the eggs his mother was cooking; his father’s arms large and warm and coarse with hair where they held him; the sun rising in the horizon, the first break of an endless summer day. Before Sara, he had forgotten that first happiness. He had forgotten the wonderful ache of love he had for his father. He had remembered, for so long, only the pain. 

Time, Grissom acknowledged with some grief, could not be stopped. Sara could not be preserved like his insects in a glass jar; life was motion, stillness was death. Eventually she’d draw her feet off his lap, or she’d fall asleep, or he’d finish the book. The sun would set. Another day would dawn, and Grissom could not know what it held, could only hope with the painful zeal of the desperate that it would hold her. 

He wanted to stay here, but this was near the end of a long strange year, and it didn’t start this way. It didn’t end this way, either. There’s too much else to be said, though he may not want to say it. 

~*~

There was a small tape inserted into the tape player on his desk that he will not play. The truth can be a disease: sometimes you suffer less if you never know you have it. 

While Nicholas Stokes had been getting drugged and forced into the back of a van, perhaps even while he was being buried alive under tons of earth in a trip-wired glass coffin, Grissom had had his hands tangled in the riotous curls of Sara’s hair. He had forgotten the feel of her carotid pulse beating against his tongue. Or maybe the first time around he had not been thorough enough to notice, assuming wrongly that he’d have many more chances to catalogue all the details. Grissom had worried, also wrongly, that he had forgotten in the intervening years how to do this: how to make love to a beautiful woman. He’d been sorely out of practice. There’d been Teri and Heather, each only the one time, in the past five years. But it all came back quite quickly, like riding a bicycle.

When Grissom was sixteen, he’d been playing basketball with his neighbor when he tripped and fell hard on his shoulder. It had dislocated. It was a very painful injury, his shoulder swelling and limiting motion immediately, but Grissom, being an uncomplaining child and moderately afraid of medical doctors, had said nothing of it, only walking home, his good arm gripping his injured bicep. He’d said nothing to his mother, either, and eventually the first flame of agony had dulled into a constant gnawing throb, and the seized muscles adapted to the strain, and Grissom thought maybe, maybe, if he continued to ignore it it would go away entirely. Two weeks passed in this fashion. Eventually his injury was noticed and he was dragged by his ear to the doctor, who had, in a remarkably painful procedure, popped his shoulder back into place. The movement was sharp and audible and a scorching shock, and then the relief came, profound, soft and creamy as butter, the wonderful sense of rightness and relief of suffering. 

Sara had been on top of him rolling her hips in a deliciously fluid movement that had him about fifteen seconds away from an orgasm when the call came. She lost rhythm, and then gazed at him expectantly with those soft eyes which held an apparent conviction that he would answer the phone in the middle of sex. So he did.

“Something’s happened to Nick,” he remembered saying to her. He didn’t remember her reply, only that a few minutes later she stopped him as he was about to go out the door, directed him with a slight tug at the collar of his shirt towards her.

There was some watery look on her face he couldn’t really name, and her soft mouth pressing kisses to his cheeks and both his eyes as he closed them in turn, one per. “I’ll be with you,” she had said. 

That was the moment: he didn’t hear the pop this time around, but he felt the shift all the same, jarring, painful, and then the flood of relief, the absence of a grinding heartbreak that had infected his every waking moment for five years. Dizzying. A feeling of something moving into place where it belonged, a disfiguring displacement corrected. A slow start of healing. Where he had been alone, he was joined; what he had been forced to restrain, he could now set free. He could finally show her the love that had grown beneath the surface of his soul, an extensive root system that did not die despite his forever cutting back the flowers that breached the soil. His devotion had found a home. 

He’d pressed his forehead against hers, and tucked a kiss into the join of her jaw and neck. “I’ll see you soon, honey,” he’d said, and left. 

~*~

_ Several months previous:  _

Sara seemed to be doing substantially better, and Grissom wondered why. He had assigned PEAP counseling to her, which he supposed she was attending; it was always possible, of course, that she was putting on a front for him - very much Sara’s style - but given the - well - the -  _ defeated  _ way she had addressed their - well - their... collegial relationship when he dropped her off after her DUI, he guessed she was not particularly concerned, at this juncture, with going out of her way to please him. 

And so he presumed it was the PEAP. 

Of course - and he would be a fool not to consider this - it may be that she was also anticipating a change. She had nearly left him - them - the lab - just over two years ago, and it had been a very close thing, convincing her to stay. She had stayed for him. Not for them. Not for the lab. And so, if the sentiment she expressed in her apartment that night a month or two ago was to be believed - that is to say, that it was ‘too late’ to fix things between herself and him - Grissom seriously doubted whether he would have the power to keep her in Las Vegas, if it came to it. 

Grissom knew Sara had been desperately unhappy the past year or so; this much was obvious. What was less obvious to him was why. He had always known she was at risk of burnout, of course, the way she led with her heart, let herself feel so much. But what had precipitated the sudden decline? A small part of him worried it was his rejection of her advance. She had, at the very least, dropped any pretense of pursuing him or flirting with him or enticing him since he had declined her invitation to dinner. Grissom was not so narcissistic to think that only his rejection had sent her spiralling into despair for over a year, however. There was something brittle inside of her, something delicate and wounded, like a broken bone she kept tucked away but howled with pain at every inevitable jostle. And this was not a bone broken in a fall or bicycle accident: this was a bone that had snapped beneath the twisting fists of the world. Somebody had hurt her. He wanted to know who. He wanted to know how. 

He knew there could be no reason why. Sara was an angry, impulsive, tempestuous person, certainly, but she was kind -  _ fiercely _ kind - and  _ good _ in a way that was almost compulsive, almost outside of her own reason or control. There could be no reason Grissom could imagine for anybody to want to hurt her. Where many in her place might be jaded, she was only wounded; always amazed, it seemed, by the horrors of the world, though Grissom sensed that she had known those horrors early and often. But she never seemed to expect them. She always believed things would get better, people would be kinder, that wounds would heal and comatose patients would wake and rapists would go to prison, no matter how many times she was wrong, no matter how infuriatingly irrational her belief seemed to him. There was some North star in her soul that always pointed her towards hope. 

It was the only reason she had stuck by  _ him _ these past five years, though Grissom, like the rapists who were released and the comatose patients who never woke and the wounds that wouldn’t heal, had only ever proved her hope ill-placed. 

Grissom sighed, setting his pen down carefully on the stack of paperwork he was signing. Case files from the team. Sara, Nick, Warrick, Catherine. He knew all their handwriting, all their little quirks and oversights as they scribbled notes and typed reports. Nick overused commas, no matter how many times Grissom reminded him not to. Catherine always turned her reports in late. Warrick always submitted his reports with a post-it to Grissom asking questions about things he hadn’t understood or leads he wished he had had time to pursue. In the margins of Sara’s reports he always found notes in shorthand and that shorthand in a scrawling script that was, Grissom knew for fact, completely indecipherable to anybody in the lab aside from himself and her. When she had first arrived in the lab, he had only narrowed his eyes at the incomprehensible flecks of ink scribbled all over her case reports, but after five years of studying her work, he knew it almost as well as his own writing, and had been called in on more than one occasion to translate the notes by their case archivist. He never told Sara about this nor asked her write more clearly, though he wasn’t sure why not. 

And soon enough it would be Greg’s reports he was signing off on, though the boy was not yet ready to take solo cases. Grissom was pleased, he supposed, by Greg’s desire to get into the field. The boy really loved the work. That was a special asset, one Grissom insisted upon in all his team members. But Greg’s demeanor could use some work: he was childish, at times unprofessional, and frequently irritating. And, Grissom was fairly sure, in love with Sara.

Which was understandable. But not forgivable.

The relationship between Greg and Sara was not so different, Grissom supposed, than that between Sara and himself. Greg admired her as a mentor, believed idealistically in her knowledge and experience and all she had to teach him. That admiration had bled easily into a fonder, warmer affection that had grown, through years of close work together, into love. Not a foundation for a real relationship: as much hero worship as genuine understanding and regard. Sara, to her credit, took Greg’s feelings in stride, neither encouraging nor rebuffing them, seeming to appreciate Greg’s love for her with the same kind of generous easy-going humor as she had taken David Phillips’ crush or even Nick Stokes early flirtations. In that respect, Sara was far superior a mentor than Grissom himself was. Grissom had not taken Sara’s idealized affection in stride. Though he had constantly reminded himself it was a natural result of their respective positions, her love had infected him like a venom, and Grissom was paralyzed by it, totally overcome. He had come to believe, against his own rationality and common sense, that it was  _ real _ , that it was  _ him,  _ and not merely what he represented to her, that she loved. And in believing it - though the better part of him knew it was a fool’s belief - he had come to reciprocate her feelings.

Well, Grissom reflected, that may be editing history slightly. He had, of course, been drawn to her immediately, as much as she was drawn to him. But still - he was the one in the position of power, and it was his responsibility, therefore, to set the boundaries, to remain awake and aware of the impossibility of an intimate connection. He had failed in this, in feeling if not in action. He loved her, was in love with her. Thought of her constantly - fantasized. And the fantasies made his stomach knot, made his throat ache. He  _ felt _ about her. He hadn’t acted, of course. He had known better than to act. It would only end in heartache. She loved an image of him, not a reality. She didn’t really know him. He had never allowed her to know him. 

“Grissom.”

Grissom jerked slightly, startled, dropping his pen. He snapped his gaze from where he’d been gazing dully at his shelves to the woman leaning in his doorway. The light from the hallway framed her oddly, casting her face in shadow, making her already long rangy body appear almost wraith-like, as if she were a Gothic apparition visiting upon him. “Sara,” he replied, pushing away the brief, irrational thought he so often entertained that she had somehow sensed he was thinking about her, “how can I help you?”

She didn’t answer right away, just stood there in his doorway, arms crossed over her ribcage, head tilted against the door frame. Grissom wished he could see her eyes. He was beginning to feel anxious beneath her enigmatic gaze; his ears were starting to itch. “How was Greg today?”

Grissom cleared his throat, relief suffusing his body. “He did well. As well as I expected. He’ll take work, but I see your influence on him.” Grissom tilted his head, staring thoughtfully into the twin shadows where her eyes hid from him. “You’ve taught him well.”

She nodded, lifting one hand to rake it through her hair. Grissom rested his tongue against his lower lip, watching her dark hair part like waters around her fingers, tumble and curl carelessly against her neck and the soft line of her jaw. 

Grissom wondered, deep in the privacy of his own mind, whether Sara was having much sex these days. He’d known about the paramedic, of course, but that was a couple of years back; Grissom distantly recalled Catherine informing him of betrayal and heartbreak. Grissom had only half-listened to the story; it made him jealous and unhappy and wasn’t any of his business, anyway. He knew he would be the last person to hear of it if Sara had been seeing anybody since then, probably wouldn’t know for certain until a wedding invitation arrived on his desk. Or, worse yet, when photos of the wedding he hadn’t been invited to began circling the lab, and he’d realize he hadn’t noticed the engagement ring for the past six months. 

Grissom felt his eyes move involuntarily to her third finger - just in case.

He hoped she was having sex. Sort of. She’d been a wonderful lover, a lifetime ago when she’d been his; beautiful, of course, and so sweet, and looking at him like he was delicious, like he was everything she’d wanted served on a silver platter. And she’d come hard beneath his fingers and against his tongue and around his cock, and then woken him the next morning for more. She liked sex. She deserved sex. She ought to have sex. It was an important part of a healthy lifestyle.  _ Like breakfast,  _ he thought, and smiled to himself. 

And she did seem happier lately. Maybe it wasn’t the PEAP counseling - maybe it was some young, handsome man, somebody who was an intellectual like her, hopefully. Somebody kind. And gentle. Somebody who appreciated her independence and her strength but also the soft vulnerability she tried so desperately to deny. Somebody sunny and vivacious and free, like her. Somebody who would take care of her, protect her, make sure she had what she needed to be happy. Somebody who cherished her. 

Grissom thought he could be happy for her, if she found that. He would naturally despise any man for whom she settled, anyone who was not worthy of her. But if she found somebody who really loved her - he could come around to that. It would be awful, of course, at first. A grief. But he had grieved before. 

“I just wanted to tell you,” Sara was saying, tucking one errant strand of hair behind her ears, gazing steadfastly at his radiated pig fetus, “I’ve been doing the PEAP sessions. Two more til I’m through.”

Grissom nodded, picking up his pen, setting it back down. “Have they been…?”

“Yeah,” she said. She stepped forward into the light, and he could see her at last, seeming nervous and young. “They’ve been good. Helping me… let go of things. You know. Things that have been holding me back.” She looked up then, right at him. “Helping me move on.”

_ Good _ , he thought to himself.  _ That’s good. Wonderful. A relief. A load off my shoulders.  _ “I’m glad to hear that,” he said.

Sara nodded, not smiling. Ducked back out of his office without another word.

Grissom waited until she had disappeared down the hall before pressing the two first fingers of his right hand into the radial pulse of his left wrist. He counted beneath his breath.

98 beats per minute.

~*~

He laid in bed the afternoon after Ecklie ripped apart his team, silent, staring at the thousand tiny indents in the plaster of his bedroom ceiling. 

It was not despair, precisely, that Grissom felt in that moment: more a sense of a hand that had been lying loose around his throat finally tightening into a breathless vice. Where had been his first misstep, he wondered? His first error? Catherine had always told him he was careless, callous, oblivious. Had he missed the signs? Was he too deep in his microscope?

And yet hadn’t he had his successes? He had the best lab in the country - and the best team in the lab. He’d managed to make a scientist of niave, sensitive Nick; he’d pulled Warrick back from the edge of vice; he’d championed Catherine when all others judged her on her looks and her sex and her past. And he’d given up a life with a woman he loved in order to preserve the team. 

Wasn’t that enough? Hadn’t he sacrificed  _ enough _ ? What more could they ask of him? 

He thought about calling Catherine, having her over for a drink and some commiseration. She would come, he knew. She was good like that. But it was not she who he dialed.

A grunt: “Sidle.”

“Oh,” said Grissom, glancing at the clock on his bedside. “Were you asleep?”

Laughter. “My PEAP counselor may be good, Grissom, but she’s not a miracle worker.”

“Right. Well, good. That you weren’t asleep, I mean.” A pause. This was why Grissom enjoyed speaking with Sara on the phone: she never hurried him. He always felt pressed when in her physical presence to force out words that had not yet germinated, but over the phone she was patient, she let him pick through his syllables with a poet’s deliberation. “You know, I advised Brass against hiring Nicky way back when.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. He was so… young. And I wasn’t sure he was cut out for the work. He seemed too earnest and naive. Not enough of an analyst. Not like us. But Brass owed some guy in Texas PD a favor, so he overruled me. I’m glad he did.”

“Yeah. Imagine not having Nick. What about Warrick? What was he like?”

“Oh, Warrick was a star - a wunderkind. Everybody wanted him. He was recruited all over, but wanted to stay close to home. I knew he’d be great. I didn’t have any input in the hiring process at that point, though. You know - you’re the only person I’ve actually hired. Promoted Greg, I guess. But you’re the only hire.”

“Mm,” she hummed. “Your first and final.”

Grissom laughed a little. “Exactly.” In more ways than she knew, perhaps. “I still can’t really believe it, Sara. Just like that. Over - over a fingerprint.”

“I know,” Sara said sadly. “You’ve given so much for the team.”

“Too much, Sara,” Grissom said, a little hoarse. This was why he liked talking to her on the phone: he didn’t have to look into her eyes. “I would do it differently, if I could.”

“I’m sure we all would, given the chance.”

Grissom chewed on this ambiguous statement for a moment. 

“Things will be different now,” Sara continued. “Sofia. Greg. A new team.”

“Yeah,” agreed Grissom. “But I still have you.”

“What would you have done if I’d been transferred to Catherine?”

Grissom blinked. “I’d have been sad, I guess.”

“You wouldn’t have been my supervisor anymore.”

Oh.  _ Oh _ . “Sara…”

“Nevermind. Gris - just - forget I said that.”

He should say something - he knew he should. What harm would it do, really, to indulge her what-if? To say, sure, I’d have asked you to dinner? It wasn’t even possible - couldn’t he give her something so small to make her happy?

(Hadn’t he already given  _ enough?)  _

“Grissom, I’m a little tired. I think - I think I’m gonna try to catch some shut eye. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, and he kept the phone to ear for long seconds after she hung up, letting the dial tone ring painfully against his eardrum.

~*~

Catherine proposed - as a conciliatory gesture, Grissom was fairly sure - that despite the team being split, they should all celebrate their usual Thanksgiving potluck together. A way of acknowledging the parting of ways, and, given the way she had smiled beatifically at him as she announced her intentions, something intended to please him. The old gang back together.

Grissom despised the annual Thanksgiving potluck.

Outside the confines of the lab, away from the structure and purpose of science and law enforcement, Grissom was a man adrift at sea. Warrick and Nick and Sara and Catherine were no longer colleagues and fellow investigators, but rather people - younger people, aside from Catherine - with feelings and impulses and inside jokes. 

“Oh,” Grissom had objected weakly, “I don’t know…”

But Catherine had sensibly pointed out that if they did not celebrate their Thanksgiving potluck all together, then Grissom would be obliged to host a separate potluck for his team. Sara, Greg, and Sofia. Obviously not at Catherine’s house, as had been tradition; perhaps at his own domicile? Grissom had paled; Catherine had beamed. 

And so Grissom found himself, stuffing in hand, standing upon Catherine’s doorstep with his head bowed to his chin. He might have been praying, though his eyes, if one cared to notice, were just barely open. 

“We’re supposed to believe in justice.”

Grissom did not turn, though his fingers tightened their grip reflexively on his pyrex container of still-steaming stuffing. “Some might argue the holiday has been adapted to contemporary values, and no longer celebrates the conquest of Native Americans the way it had historically.”

“And some might be full of shit,” she replied. He heard her blow out a sharp, angry huff of air, and heard her rustling around behind him. Grissom instructed his eyeballs very sternly to remain fixed upon Catherine’s front door. “This holiday celebrates the genocide of hundreds of indigeonous communities within the United States, not to mention contributes to the mythology of our origins as somehow being a peaceful gesture of friendship between settler-colonists and the American Indian communities. And it romanticizes American Indians and makes them seem like a relic of the past. Who ever talks about modern indigenous people in the United States? They are disappeared from the public imaginary even as they live and breath today.”

She stepped up alongside him. He saw from the tail of his vision that she was wearing a long black peacoat that made her look like a New York socialite, and a scarf. And a scowl. “Well,” Grissom said in a low, measured tone, “maybe we should just leave.”

Sara turned to stare at him for a moment. Her eyes bored hotly into the side of his head. “I already made mashed potatoes,” she said, and then raised her hand to pound her fist on the door like they were there to execute a search warrant.

Nick answered the door, his eyebrows narrowing even as he smiled down at them both. “Wow, don’t you two just look like the life of the party,” he said, stepping aside. Sara sulked into Catherine’s home, and Grissom trailed in behind her, toeing his shoes off politely at the entranceway and padding quietly into the kitchen. He found Catherine wearing a floral print dress and an apron, her hair done up with curls, looking like a 1950s housewife from a magazine. 

“Gil!” she cried, and Grissom noted with an inward twang of humor that he could hear the wine in her voice, “you’re here!” She waved a spatula in greeting. Grissom inhaled deeply the smell of roasting turkey and sizzling bacon and gravy and brussel sprouts and cornbread. “Get yourself something to drink.”

Grissom set his offering on the counter. “Stuffing,” he said, nudging it towards his host. He crossed to the counter and poured himself a glass of Pinot Noir. “Refill?”

Catherine offered him a feline grin. “You’re a mind reader.” 

Grissom filled her glass to the brim, and Catherine swooped it into one hand as she set her other hand on his shoulder and stared up at him. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the kitchen and she looked like she was glowing with happiness. Grissom felt an uncharacteristic pull of affection for her, this woman he had known as long as he’d known anybody, just about. He was suddenly aware of how much he would miss seeing her every day. 

“I can’t believe they’re separating us,” she said, and now  _ she  _ was the mind reader. “We’ve been together, oh, how long now?”

“Fall of ‘88,” Grissom replied, taking a long sip off his glass. “You were hired on as the first female lab tech in our department. Wore leather pants on your first day on the job. Everyone was ready for you to fail, but you proved ‘em wrong, like you’ve been doing ever since.”

Catherine tossed her head back, sighing. “Oh, Gil, you used to be so handsome,” she said, quite sadly. Grissom laughed. “Not that it did you any good, though. Sara,” Catherine continued, turning to the CSI who had slunk behind them to deposit her bowl of mashed potatoes on the kitchen island, “oh, Sara, you should’ve seen him back then… the hair, that chiseled jaw, those blue eyes… always taking off his shirt to go climbing up chimneys at crime scenes or swimming in pools to look for murder weapons… all the girls were ga-ga for him, back then. And he never even gave them a second look.” Catherine frowned at him, shaking her head like he was a starving dog in one of those heart-wrenching ASPCA commercials. “Eyes only for his bugs.”

Grissom felt Sara’s gaze prickling on his skin, rising as a flush up his neck to his ears. He looked at her involuntarily, and she was staring at him, blank-faced. He  _ had  _ been handsome once. He had been young and passionate and idealistic. Full of energy and hope. Curious. Not the sad, quiet, heart-weary middle aged man he was now, full of fear and second doubts, clinging jealously to whatever small treasures he’d accumulated in his decades of life. Eyes only for his bugs. And a young woman he could never be enough for. 

“I can imagine,” Sara said, and Grissom knew that she could. 

Catherine poured Sara a glass of white wine over Sara’s objections, shoving it into her hand with the kind of forceful good intentions only a mother could master. Sara sighed and took a tiny sip off of the glass to appease her senior colleague, casting guilty little furtive glances his way like she was a teenager sneaking a cigarette behind daddy’s back. 

Grissom winced at the analogy. 

Grissom and Sara were then expelled in no uncertain terms from the kitchen, and they meandered hesitantly through the dining room where Warrick was laying the dishware, into the living room, where Nick was fiddling with the stereo and Greg was playing some card game with Lindsey full of rude phrases that had the teen howling with laughter. 

Greg spotted them immediately and threw up both arms in greeting. “If it isn’t G-man and S-dawg, the gruesome twosome! Everybody’s favorite crime-fighting duo!” 

Grissom stared. He had not realized until this very instant how little he desired to see Greg Sanders intoxicated. 

“Hey!” chastited Nick, laughing and slurring himself. “Don’t embarrass them, Greggo. Just because they arrived here together wearing matching colors doesn’t mean you can run around calling them a twosome.”

Grissom flinched.  _ This  _ was why he hated holiday parties, or any extra-curricular socialization with colleagues: it was no holds barred, all the unfiltered thoughts of people who ordinarily would not dream of letting such accusations fly. And Grissom struggled to find solid footing, his authority to reprimand. As he looked sidelong at Sara, he saw that the navy of her blouse perfectly matched his tie.  _ Fuck _ , he thought miserably. “I…”

Sara came up and shoved Nick hard on the shoulder, also laughing. “Careful, boys,” she said, turning to Greg and giving him a bedroom look through her lashes, “your jealousy is showing.”

Nick crowed good-naturedly, but Greg’s smile slipped a little - she had hit nearer the mark than she knew, Grissom realized. 

“Gil!” 

The voice was sharp, a little haughty, and Grissom wheeled around to find Lindsey Willows summoning all her fifteen years to gaze imperiously up at him from her seat. “Please, come join our game.” She spoke to him in a tone of demand that was so startlingly similar to Catherine’s own that Grissom felt himself shuffling defeatedly towards the teenager before his prefrontal cortex could point out the absurdity of the situation. Lindsey shifted her gaze to Sara, not an ounce of mercy in her expression. “And you, too.”

Grissom peered at Sara over his shoulder, who was frowning slightly, looking warily at the adolescent poised like a queen on the plush leather couch in the middle of the living room. 

“Better do as she says,” Nick chimed in unnecessarily, “this one means business.”

Nick, who had been raised with sisters, was much better equipped than either Grissom or Sara to resist Lindsey’s command. Sara slouched unhappily into the loveseat, squishing herself in next to Greg, who smiled at her with such tenderness that Grissom felt a funny little squeeze somewhere between the lobes of his lungs. 

The game was called  _ Cards Against Humanity,  _ and all involved - Lindsey, Greg, Sara, and even Nick, who was not playing - seemed calmly certain that Grissom would be abysmally poor at it. Grissom frowned, feeling slighted; Catherine’s recent lament on his lost youth rang too closely in his ears. He was no spring chicken, perhaps, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t come up with a rude joke or two. 

The first round, Lindsey judged, and Greg won with a match that referenced something about internet cat videos Grissom really didn’t follow. Greg judged next, and Sara won with a card set referencing death metal and anal beads that had Greg gazing at Sara like she was God’s gift to earth. 

Grissom only noticed he was grinding his teeth as one tooth cracked against another, and deliberately relaxed his jaw. 

Sara was the third judge. Grissom peered down thoughtfully at his cards. He lay his card down with a sigh, hoping his gamble wasn’t too bold. Sara flipped his last, and as she read it, she laughed aloud, her eyes widening, and slapped her hand over it immediately, turning to Greg. “This is yours?!”

Greg mutely shook his head. 

Sara looked between Lindsey and Grissom, appearing as though she could not decide who was more alarming a culprit, her palm still pressed down on the winning card. Grissom leaned forward, letting his fingertips graze against hers as he pulled the card out from beneath her hand. The prompt,  _ Charades was ruined for me when my mom had to act out _______,  _ was replaced in the deck, and Grissom set his answer,  _ An Oedipus Complex,  _ to the left of him. 

The game went on, and soon enough Warrick appeared with two more bottles of wine to refill their drinks and join in. Nick was persuaded by his friend’s participation, and everybody shuffled around to make room; Sara ended up sitting next to Grissom, so close, by mere necessity, that his leg was pressed against hers, and he felt her laughter shaking through his body as she saw the cards Warrick was judging. 

Warrick chose her card, and Grissom’s eyebrows bounced up as Warrick read it aloud:  _ What brought the orgy to a grinding halt? Child protective services.  _ Grissom swung around to stare at Sara, who reddened, sheepish but grinning, and shrugged. 

“Depraved,” Grissom muttered, only loud enough that she could hear it.

Sara shot him a look of real worry, but, seeing his expression, pressed her mouth against a smile. “I hear back in 1988 you had a great sense of humor… I wonder what happened to it,” she replied, _sotto_ _voce_. 

Grissom felt a strange rush of feeling, some of it the wine, he knew, and some of it just her, just Sara, hitting him like a needle in the vein, breathing life to him, as she so often did; Sara, who was the moment the paint strokes take the shape of a human face; Sara, who was the last jolting catch as the jet becomes airborne; Sara, the magic to make Pinnochio a real boy. “I met this girl who took my seminar at a conference in 1998,” Grissom answered, tilting his chin down to look at her through his lashes, dropping his voice to its lower registers to ensure he would not be overhead, “and everything’s felt very serious since then.”

Sara stared at him, expressionless but for the rising twin rosebuds of color on her cheeks, her eyes moving rapidly over his face, like he was a puzzle she had to solve in order to defuse a bomb. 

But something shifted in her face: she had caught her balance just before falling, and straightened. The color receded, and she blinked, tilting her head slightly. “Careful, boss,” she said, still soft but no longer a whisper, “a girl might get the wrong idea.”

Grissom recoiled. 

“I’ll be helping Catherine in the kitchen,” Grissom said, standing abruptly.

He found Catherine checking the turkey in the oven. “How can I help?”

Catherine glanced at him, arching a brow. “Had enough of playing with the kids?”

Grissom pressed his mouth, scowling at her slightly. 

His dear friend smiled. “So how do you feel about our shared custody arrangement, anyways? Did you have any say over who you got?”

Grissom sighed, pouring himself another glass of wine, blinking to sharpen his focus. “No. It was Conrad. He does not ask; he decrees. But I’m content with how things worked out.”

Catherine nodded. “So am I.” And he could see for the first time that beneath the glow of pride there was a shimmering anxiety in her, that she was afraid things would  _ not  _ work out. 

“You’re going to do great,” Grissom said, meaning it. “You’re ready for this. You’ve  _ been  _ ready.”

Catherine smiled a little thinly. “We’ll see.” She gave him a scrutinizing look. “Did you get who you wanted? For your team?”

Grissom paused, considering his wine glass for a moment. He had not, until speaking with Sara on the phone the other day, considered what it might have meant for the teams to have been arranged differently; Ecklie’s decision seemed chaotic and random, an act of nature, not something to be questioned. But now Grissom wondered about a world where he had Warrick and Nick with him, and Sara worked under Catherine, mentored Greg. He would not see her anymore. Maybe, with a little distance, she’d fall for Greg, and he would run into them as their shifts overlapped, find them kissing sweetly in the parking lot. Maybe, with Sara on another team, Grissom would have suggested she and he catch up over a meal at the end of her shift and just before his, and they’d make a habit of it, and maybe he’d walk her home and maybe one day she’d invite him up and maybe he’d finally find the words he’d lost as she first crossed the podium towards him with her eyes fixed on his face some seven years ago. 

Maybe.

“I got what I wanted,” Grissom decided, though he was not sure it was true.

~*~

There was no murder gene. There was only a girl curled up in an armchair, crying into her elbow. 

_ She’s a watercolor painting _ , Grissom thought a little dreamily as he turned on the faucet to fill up her tea kettle with water. Watching the crests and ebbs of Sara’s feelings made him wonder if they were really so different after all; he never felt more aligned with her than when she wept. Her feelings, a riot of thirsty color like a field of wildflowers - and his, the smooth sloping soil in which they grew. 

The kettle whistled.

She rose to take her mug of tea from him, wiping one hand under her nose, embarrassed and defiant.  _ You asked for this,  _ her eyes seemed to accuse. Grissom tugged at her elbow to prevent her returning to her chair, guiding her down next to him on her couch. Tears glimmered on her cheeks, caught like drips of glass on the corner of her lips. Grissom coaxed one onto the tip of his pointer finger, shifting his hand this way and that to watch the light reflect off the sphere. He set his finger lightly against his lips and tasted her sadness: salty and sweet. 

Sara pulled his hand down, her fingers loose around his wrist. She opened her mouth to speak, and Grissom could not bear the thought; he dipped forward and caught her words on his lips, tasting them, too, and they were sweet - and a little salty. 

She pulled back, studying him like a piece of evidence that’s turned the case on its head. Grissom used his thumb to smear a tear from the seam of her eye down her cheek in a sweeping motion, like a brush stroke. 

Sara let the distance yawn between them for a few unsteady moments, and Grissom felt the horror of it keenly. But soon enough she gripped him at the nape of his neck, her fingers skating through the puppy-soft hairs that curled there as she tugged him forward and they joined up as seamlessly as though it was still San Francisco on a cloudy afternoon. Grissom hummed as her tongue slipped against his, his left thumb on the swell of her cheekbone, his right palm folding over the bones of her shoulder. 

It was, in hindsight, a huge, important moment, but it felt only like a deep breath after a long swim, like the sunrise after an ink-black night: an everyday miracle that was no less wonderful for its sense of inevitability. Grissom didn’t vacillate or contemplate - not until afterwards, at any rate - and he wasn’t seized in a storm of furious passion. It was only that his love was a breaking wave, and he yielded to it. 

Sara broke away from him, turning her face towards the couch. “It can’t be like this,” she said.

Grissom felt the plunge and the dizzying gasp for air. Shook his head at her in despairing confusion.

“You haven’t given me a second look in five years.” She turned her eyes to him, hard and sad and looking at him like she knew him better than she wished she did. “Tell me that you love me. That you want to be with me. For real. Then yes -  _ yes.  _ But not… a kiss on my couch after I pour my heart out, and then business as usual.”

Grissom was silent.

Sara nodded, a fresh sheen of tears in her eyes as she sighed and looked up at the ceiling. Grissom was reminded starkly of the first day they met, the question she’d asked for which he had no answer:

_ Why do people kill each other?  _

_ Why do they love each other?  _ he wanted to ask instead. It wasn’t an answer, but it might be the closest thing he’d ever come to a proper response.  _ Why, when it’s terrifying and painful and it never seems to get better? Why, when it always ends in dissolution or death? I’d rather be killed,  _ he thought morosely,  _ than face a life without you.  _ “I don’t... know how to do... this,” Grissom managed, feeling like he was digging the words out of his body like picking out shrapnel with tweezers. 

“I know,” Sara said dully. Her eyes were frighteningly blank as she gazed at him.

He saw her then quite vividly: nine years old, blood saturating her cotton nightgown, sobbing into her father’s neck. Her fingers would be stuck together with gore, and her mother's moaning cries would echo through her skull for the next five or six or ten or twenty years, mournful and low like the keen of a dying animal. She’d be a trembling leaf as the social worker led her from the house, and her eyes would be blank then, too, blank but below the black tunnels of her eyes her soul would writhe and twist with a deep lacerating stab wound that would fester in the mildewy dark for many, many years to come. She’d feel rotten and crazy and loveless, she’d feel wild, she’d feel like the only lonely person in the whole wide world. She didn’t expect him to love her because nobody had before; she was operating on precedent; she was following the evidence, his favorite student. 

Grissom felt something cracking inwardly, and worried it was his heart. With a sense of dawning wonder, he realized that he was all she had in the world. He was not enough for her. This was as certain as gravity in his mind. And yet - and  _ yet _ , against all rationality,  _ he _ was who she had chosen.

Grissom pressed a kiss to the edge of Sara’s lips because it was the only way he could think of in the moment to manage the joy and pain. 

She slumped forward without resistance, folding into his shoulder. He hauled her up so she was tucked against him, warm and long-limbed, her hair catching on his lips, her smell like the smell of floral shampoo and fingerprint powder. 

Someday, Grissom decided, she would know that he cherished her. 

~*~

Sofia pressed a cool, dry kiss to his cheek as he bid her goodnight, and he was reminded very strongly of Teri Miller, composed and quiet and cold to the touch. Grissom dialed into his cell phone as he wandered back towards his car. 

“Sidle.”

He sighed a little, shutting one eye and then the other. “Is it safe to assume the lab rumor mill has already updated you as to my current location?”

A pause. “Did she ask you?”

“No. I asked her.”

He could tell she’d shifted the phone away from her face.  _ Come back _ , he thought. “Is there something you need from me, Grissom?”

_ A life together,  _ he thought.  _ Your whole heart, undivided. Your body. Your soul.  _ “It wasn’t a date.”

“Okay.”

“It would be, if I asked you.”

“Right.”

“Sara…”

A harsh sigh.

“What?”

“Every time I try to move on, Grissom, you do this.”

“Do what?”

“Reel me back in. And then cut me loose again.”

“I know.” A pause. “I don’t want you to move on.”

Joyless laughter. “Does this satisfy you, Grissom? Does it make you happy to have me dangling by a string, there to fall back on whenever you feel lonely?”

“Is that what this is?” 

“That’s what it feels like.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“I just…”

“ ‘... don’t know how to do this.’ I know.”

“Sara…”

“You know what, Grissom? It’s fine. I get it. It’s fine. Just don’t call me anymore, okay?”

“... Okay.”

“Goodbye, Grissom--”

“--Wait!”

“What?”

“Let’s… Sara, let’s get dinner.”

“You’re joking.”

“No - no, I’m not. Let me take you out to dinner.”

“Like Sofia.”

“No, no… like a date. It doesn’t - it could be, uh, a museum or something, if you don’t want to do dinner…”

“A date.”

“Yes.”

“Why.”

“Why?”

“Why would you take me on a date.”

“Because - I - because I want to - date you.”

“You want to date me.”

“Sara, why do you keep repeating what I’m saying?”

A mangled sound, somewhere between a laugh and a scream and a sob. “Grissom!”

“Wh - what?”

“Come over. Now.”

“Come… to your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

“Yes. Now.”

“Oh… okay.”

~*~

The memory of their first time after so long was both vivid and a blur: like slow motion, the details too accentuated for him to hold onto the larger context. So he’ll recount the flashes as they occurred to him:

the sensation of her hand skirting along the waistband of his slacks, and sliding lower, her fingers slightly bent so that the nails made a soft scraping sound against the fabric, and the fingertips finding the firm fabric ridge of his erection beneath the layers of his clothes, and her palm pressed down against the glans of his penis, pushing his cock into his stomach, sending a jolt of pleasure through the head down the shaft and up the base of his spine that made his teeth click together 

the taste of her vulva - metallic, buttery, almost burnt, coating the back of his throat and making his head swim with some guttural male instinct of  _ want  _ and  _ mine -  _ and the texture against his tongue, so slippery and delicate and warm, as intricate as a butterfly’s wing patterns, folds and petals, the give of her vagina, the stiffness of her clitoris. He took his time, ignoring her pleas for more focused attention, keeping the swipes of his tongue light and inconstant, wanting to wind her a little tighter, a little higher, vengeance, in a way, for these years of wanting and not having her, though it was not at all her fault. Her legs thrashed by his head, the muscles of her thighs toned and taut from her daily runs, and Grissom appeased her with two fingers pushing inside, and his hand looked strangely huge and rough compared to this most private part of her, and she arched like a bow drawn back to fire as he hooked his fingers up, distantly remembering the old trick as the pads of his fingers found the slick spongy give inside her and she gasped aloud

the feel of penetrating her, so tight that he had to keep pausing, his heart crashing against his ribs, his eyes memorizing the flush that crept down her breasts and that brought her nipples to a rosebud point, and then he’d slide in another half of an inch and feel her constrict around him again, like a velvet glove, hot and slick and so, so good, his breath sawing in his chest, finding her eyes with his eyes, touching his thumb to the seam of her eyelid to catch the tear, another inch, her ankles tangling together against his back and then he was all the way inside, telling himself to slow down, to breath, to savor this moment. His orgasm was like an electric pulse from his balls up his shaft that arced up and down his spine, waiting for any tiny conduit to snap through his body like a lightning strike, but Grissom kept his metaphorical feet grounded, concentrating on his breath and not the grip of her vagina on his too-sensitive cock as he eased in and out and in and out

and afterwards as she wrapped around him like an octopus, breathing through the sieve of her hair, drowsing, eyes half closed, warm as their sweat cooled, wondering if he should feel smothered but only feeling enveloped, blanketed, the same feeling of having his mother bundle him in bed when he was home sick as a little boy. He marveled that he was here, at last, at last, and she had stayed, and though he felt his heart swelling with love he saw the fragility of this moment, saw the fracture lines, could imagine so much more terrifyingly what life would feel like without her, now that he could imagine life with her

“I still want to take you to a museum,” he said into the crown of her head.

She laughed into his clavicle, and this time it was not joyless. “I don’t understand you.”

“Mm,” Grissom hummed. “Let me take you anyway.”

~*~

_ Several months later: _

There was a man gasping in a glass coffin. 

Many years ago, Grissom had volunteered at a hospice. He had been young then, handsome and possessing a kind of easy charm that comes so easily to people who have nothing to lose. He told the hospice nurses that he wanted to give back to those who were most vulnerable. In the abstract, perhaps this was true. But mostly Grissom wanted to watch people die.

He had always been fascinated by the moment of death. Was it a precipice upon which one dangled, more and more precariously, until the sudden plunge? Or was it a steep slope that you slipped down and down and down, darkening into death like shades of the night sky? Grissom wanted to know when death came  _ precisely.  _ It was a matter of some scientific debate, of course - brain or heart? minutes or hours? - and certainly the philosophers tangled with the question, but Grissom wanted to come to his own conclusions, examine evidence firsthand. Would he feel their souls as they shook that mortal coil? Or was it only the stillness and the silence and the slow decay?

Grissom had seen death firsthand, of course. He was nine years old as he sat criss-crossed on his parents shag carpeting, weight braced on his hands as he gazed up in calm wonder at the glowing, chattering television that never failed to amuse and enthrall him. It had been a cartoon about kids playing basketball. The kind of game nobody asked Gil to join in. 

Grissom would always wonder what might have happened if he had simply turned to look over his shoulder. His father had been only a foot away, sleeping, or so Gil had believed; but there would have been some sign, Grissom was sure, some tell. Death was not traceless. It left evidence in its wake. His father would have struggled - would have wanted to live. 

Had his father gasped? Grissom could not remember, had not been listening. Had his father felt the impending doom and fought it, tried in vain to signal to his stupid, selfish son who sat glued to the television, more brainless than the lowest insect? 

It was Grissom’s first failure. Not his last.

Sitting alone in the trace lab, Grissom touched the small plastic audio tape with gloved hands, turned it around and around and around.  _ Hi CSI guy! Hi CSI guy! Hi CSI guy! Hi CSI guy! _

_ Breath fast, breath slow… _

Grissom knew Warrick was watching those breaths just down the hall. Counting them. Howling and raging and weeping for his friend. Some normal response to unbearable grief. Something more normal, at any rate, than Grissom, sitting frozen like a man of stone, twirling this tape in his fingers. 

_ I hope I’ve made you proud… _

It was very difficult, Grissom reflected calmly, for him to take care of the people he loved. He had an established tendency to stand idly by as they suffered. The pattern had begun with his father, and Grissom wondered if it was some kind of repetition compulsion now, some groove in the record left by his first failure that propelled him ceaselessly to witness without interference as the people about whom he cared the most withered and died. 

What good did Grissom’s pride ever do, anyway? Why would Nick ask such a foolish question?

When Sara had spiralled into despair last year, Grissom had wanted very sincerely to save her. He had dreamed of it, had even reached out and touched the hot skin of her hand, had made her food and tried to think of words to say, and none of it had helped, none of it had made a damn bit of difference - that girl had done what she’d always had to do, and saved herself. She suited him perfectly, in that sense: she already believed the only person she could depend on was herself. It was harder to disappoint a woman with no expectations.

“Hey.” 

He hadn’t heard her come into the room, but he wasn’t startled; he had thought of her, and therefore summoned her like a bad ghost. She crossed to where he was sitting, standing behind his chair with the pretense of looking at the tape with him. Her long cool fingers found the base of his skull, walking the knobs of his spine, tugging lightly at the nip of hair growing at the nape of his neck. 

That’s almost exactly what she’d been doing while Nick was being buried alive. Had he been awake? Had he watched them nail his prison shut, watched the pounds of dirt collapsing on top of him, his funeral shroud? No. Likely not. He had probably awoken, suddenly, horribly, in the dark, small, hot prison in which he was going to slowly die.

Grissom twisted away from Sara’s touch.

He had been looking into her eyes as the kidnappers pressed the sedative into Nick’s arm. He could recall, with perfect clarity, the texture of her hair, slippery, almost like water as it slid between the tips of his fingers. Nick would not recall so clearly, Grissom knew. Nick’s mind would be bent and blurred by drugs and horror and anyways it would all be lost as he tumbled off the precipice, as the slow steep gained speed and he hurtled down into death without anybody there to stop him. Grissom had been too busy being in love to notice. 

Too distracted.

“Stop that.”

Grissom paused, looking sidelong, though she was behind him and he could not see her. “Stop what?”

“Whatever it is you’re doing. I can hear you thinking. I can hear you… deciding this is all your fault, somehow. Stop it.”

Grissom decided distantly that he preferred Lady Heather’s effortless analysis and mattress ties to this: to a woman who only understood him because she loved him enough to try. “You know where we were while they were taking him,” he said lowly.

Sara’s fingers found his hair again, this time skirting by his ears, her fingernails just barely grazing his scalp. Pleasure sizzled across his skin, and he hated how easy he was for her, how she played him like a parlor piano. “I do,” she acknowledged. “And if it weren’t for that, what? You would’ve been covering Swing shift? Stealing Catherine’s cases?” Grissom jerked his head angrily. “Stop,” Sara said again, tugging at his ear until he leaned back again within her reach. “You’re not god, Grissom. You can’t control everything. And not everything is about you. Sometimes bad things happen to people and there’s nothing to do except respond as best you can.”

“It should be me in that coffin,” Grissom said.

“No,” said Sara, soft and very, very serious. “No. It shouldn’t be  _ anyone  _ in that… in that thing. I need you, Grissom. I need you here with me.” 

Grissom shook his head slightly. Stared at the tape, motionless, nothing but a little square of plastic, dead as a doornail. “I am with you, Sara. I’ve always been with you.”

~*~

Afterwards, afterwards, he didn’t stay long at the hospital, felt awkward and intrusive as the Stokes gathered around their son, stroking and kissing and weeping, and Nick’s dark eyes found Grissom across the room, solemn, not tearful, just staring and staring, and Grissom could not decipher the feeling in them. He felt like a little boy again, looking in where he was not wanted. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he had grunted, edging towards the door.  _ Coward _ .

He had intended to drive home but had driven as though possessed to her apartment. He smelled like dirt and acrid sweat, the stench of a terrified man, and there was dust caked onto his face, in his beard, in his eyes. She answered the door and made a soft, pained sound at the sight of him. 

“Oh Gris,” she had said, “come here.”

She’d stripped him down like a doll, dropping little kisses here and there, so comfortable with his body though it had only been a handful of months since she’d been allowed to touch him, since he’d given up the struggle and surrendered to her. She drew a hot bath and folded him into it, and then tucked herself in behind him, drawing him to lean back against her breasts, slippery and silk-soft. He lolled his head against her shoulder, deciding he did not care if it was too heavy, letting his eyes drift close, letting the steamy air cloud his mouth and nose, letting the warm water lap at his bruised, aching body. 

She slowly washed him, soap slipping along his skin, suds in his hair, and he imagined this was what it was like to be a fly in a spider’s web, the sticky silk spinning around and around you, closer and closer, safe and small and far away from the hard, frightening world. He wanted to stay here forever in her arms. 

“There’s something I have to say to you, Sara,” Grissom had said.

He had felt her stiffen instantly, her fingers digging into his biceps, and he tensed reflexively in answer. “Grissom…” she had pleaded,  _ don’t do this, god, don’t do this,  _ he knew she meant to say.

“Just let me say it,” he said. “Just… let me.” He forced himself upright, creaking like an old rocking chair, pivoting in her tiny bathtub until he was able to see her, pale and frightened and dripping wet. “Sara, I… I…” 

At his father’s funeral, his mother had brought him up to take one final look, to give a last goodbye. His father had seemed strange and warped, like melted wax, his face sunken, his hands shriveled, and Gil had felt a lurching horror in the middle of him for which he had no name. “Say goodbye,” his mother had signed to him, weeping, “tell your daddy you love him.”

Gil had raised his shaking fingers, ever an obedient son, but his mother had stopped him, shaking her head.

“With your voice.”

Gil had opened his mouth, but the words would not come: only a ghastly silence, a scream that had no sound; opened his mouth and his soul poured out, wretched, wounded, noiseless, and Gil closed his mouth again, swallowed back down the terrifying sadness. It was long, long while before he spoke aloud again.

Grissom remembered that now, and it didn’t feel so different, really; he felt something pouring out of his mouth like blood, not words but some awful feeling, some sensation of vulnerability and impending heartbreak, a thousand wishes tumbling from his lips, a longing so huge it choked him. Sara shook her head, staring at him unhappily, raising her hand to grip him around the back of his neck and looking as though she were going to speak - 

“I love you.”

The words cracked through his ribs, an agonizing burst of pain, and he had jerked unpoetically through the syllables, arhythmic, disfluent, like a man with a brain disease. But he had said it, and she had heard it, her eyes widening, looking, if possible, even more terrified than she had a moment ago. “Gil,” she had said, breathless, his given name, the name his father called him. Tears sparkled in her eyes. “I love you too,” she said, hushed.

Grissom slumped forward, spent. He felt an overwhelming urge to fall asleep, but managed to drag himself out of the tub and towel off and collapse in her bed, and she followed, curling against his back, her nose brushing ticklishly against the back of his neck. Grissom didn’t like not seeing her, so he turned and drew her into his arms, set his cool forehead against hers, forcing his eyes to focus on her eyes, one at a time. “I can’t lose you,” he said, just as true as what he’d said before, though much easier to speak.

“You won’t,” she assured him, and Grissom knew as she said it that it was a promise she could not keep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof, this was a hard thing to write! Just kept getting stuck and stuck and stuck. It was so hard to try to get inside what Grissom would have been thinking and feeling through season 5. I guess his motivations are still mysterious to me, how he shifted from being so closed off in season 4 to committing himself entirely to Sara at the end of 5. 
> 
> Also, major pet peeve of mine that CSI never depicted staff holiday parties. We know they happened, guys. They should've been filmed.


	8. Gutshot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follows Sara's POV through season 6, though this is a little bit loose, not as episode-based as in previous chapters. Just my dreams of how Sara might hold her early relationship with Grissom.

Sara taps her forefinger against the bridge of Grissom’s nose. “Wake up.”

“I’m awake,” he replies, both eyes closed.

“Then get up,” she says. Tap tap tap. Tap tap.

One eyelid creaks open. “What do you want?” he asks irritably.

Tap tap tap tap. Sara looks at the watery blue of his pale-morning iris. “Isn’t it weird,” she ponders, “to think we had sex last night?”

The other eyelid lifts to join the first, two sails at half-mast. “Um,” says Grissom.

“I mean,” Sara continues, “you were  _ inside  _ my body. And this is weird, too. I’m laying on you.” She glances down illustratively at her body, her leg draped over his hips, her tummy over his tummy, her breasts pressed to his chest. “Just a couple of months ago, it felt weird when I saw you in short sleeves. ‘Oh god, Gris has got his elbows out’. And now I’m lying here on you naked, waking you up in bed. It’s weird.”

“I agree it’s weird that you’re waking me up,” Grissom says. Both of his eyes are once again closed. “Just a couple of months ago I would be sleeping peacefully on my day off.”

Sara nods, leaning her cheek on one palm to stare at his face. He’s got little crow’s feet at the corner of his eyes, and his beard has a sort of salty smell because he didn’t shower before falling asleep. She presses the tip of her forefinger to the tip of his nose, pushing it back to give him a piggish expression. He scrunches his nose and lifts one heavy hand to bat her away. “It feels surreal,” Sara decides.

Grissom sighs. His arms slide up her bare back and he scoops one hand on the back of her neck, pulling her down towards him. She yields, tucking her head into the groove of his shoulder. “Mm,” he hums approvingly, shifting a little, and she feels him getting hard against her knee. “It doesn’t seem surreal to me,” he says. “To me, it all feels very real…” Eyes still closed, he turns onto his side and eases her onto her back, his hand studying the shape of her shoulder joint and the swoop of her clavicle, the ridges of her breastbone where her ribs fuse together, and then her breasts - Sara suspects this was the intended destination from the beginning of this sensory journey - his hand enveloping the entirety of her right before lifting his hand so that he can pebble her nipple between his forefinger and thumb. 

Sara is a little sensitive, and pushes his fingers off her nipple. She arches her back, pressing her arms up over her head and yawning in a full body stretch that sends whorls of lazy pleasure through her. When she finishes, she sees Grissom is open-eyed at last, looking up and down and up and down her body the way a very hungry person might study a table laden with rich foods. “See?” Sara says, pointing at his face. “This is what I mean. It’s so weird. You never would’ve looked at me like this a couple of months ago. You would never think about me this way.”

Grissom’s eyebrows levered up, and he looked at her for only a moment before laughing. “Honey,” he says, leaning forward on his elbow to kiss the soft, soft skin of her temple, “take my word for it - I was looking, and I was definitely thinking.” He flops onto his back again, smiling, turning his head so they are both on their backs, staring nose-to-nose. “You know all my spending money in undergrad came from winnings I made playing poker?”

Sara purses her lips in an expression of surprise. “Wow. In LA?”

He shakes his head. “I’d drive to Vegas on Fridays when I had no class. I have an excellent poker face.” Grissom wiggles his head forward onto the pillow until they are lips-to-lips. “Let’s say, for the sake of this analogy, that being in love with you is a winning hand,” he mumbles into her mouth. “In that case, believe me, Sara, I’ve been holding a royal flush the whole time.”

Grissom’s breath smells a little funny. Sara kisses him anyway.

~*~

There is a terrible sadness in finally, finally getting what you need: in order to receive it, you must learn to make do with it, and you realize, in a rush of feeling so immense it is likely to splinter a person right apart, all that you have never had, all the hurts that can never be unmade, all the wrongs that will never be redressed. In order to have something real, a person must give up on the dream that they have held onto for years in place of that reality. 

Sara realizes that Grissom does not - could never - understand this. He has always known her; she was not a fantasy but a tempting, too-close reality, and the only change now is that he can finally reveal himself, that the love he had crammed with brutal force into a back corner of his soul now moves free and open between them. But Grissom had never really been known to her. He had always kept himself at a distance, apart from her. That was part of his initial appeal; she is mature enough now to acknowledge that. And now that he is so close - as close as she had ever wanted him, and at times closer - she must contend with the reality of her choice, with the very painful, very intense sensations of being fiercely loved. 

_ I’ve created a monster,  _ she thinks, not quite kidding, as Grissom burrows his warm, scratchy face into the crook of her neck. 

She had had partners before, of course. Lovers and boyfriends. Men she liked, cared about. Some of them she’d even loved. But always she had felt as though she were existing in a two dimensional plane when she was with them: that they saw the outline of her, but not the substance, not the undulating irregular surfaces that made her a textured, living thing. 

With Grissom, it is different.

Sara felt she was fully present with Grissom, all the time. He saw her at all angles, saw her in the morning just rising from the mists of sleep, saw her in a blazing fury, saw her weepy and exhausted after too long a shift, saw her sexy and coy, saw her irritable and distant, all her flaws and her quirks and her joys: he was with her in all of it, those calm eyes fixed on her, not with judgement but with attentiveness. 

It is the strangest thing she has experienced in her entire life. Nothing could have prepared her for it, not even seven years of ardent longing. Grissom is awakening parts of herself she had thought no longer sleeping but truly dead and gone. She feels transformed - not into something new, but somehow more into herself, a more real and vivid version than she’d ever been. 

“What were your parents like?”

She asks the question of the ceiling, her fingers pulling at the curly hairs on the crown of his head, straightening them and enjoying the way they bounce back as she releases each lock in turn. Grissom hummed, and she felt the vibration through her skin. 

“Uh,” he says, lifting his head from her neck as though it weighed thirty pounds, “what do you mean?”

“Their marriage,” she clarifies, touching his lips now, his nose. She is obsessed with touching him. She cannot believe it is allowed - in fact,  _ welcomed _ \- and she feels she must memorize him with her fingertips, do justice to the Sara Sidle who spent seven years dreaming of this possibility. “What were they like as a couple?”

Grissom furrows his brow, and Sara presses her thumb into the divots there as though to leave a print.  _ Evidence,  _ she thinks.  _ I want them to find me all over your skin.  _

“They were…” He hesitates, thinking. “Affectionate. I remember them kissing. My dad - he would compliment her. Say she was beautiful. They didn’t fight, not that I remember, but my dad would get - well - quiet.” Here Grissom has the grace to look abashed, but Sara only smiles. “He died, you know. So I don’t - I don’t remember a lot. I was a kid.”

Sara blinks. She had not known. “How old?”

“Nine.”

The same age she’d been when - “How did they meet?”

Grissom stares at her for a moment, and she knows he is surprised that she is not pressing him about her father, but god, how many people has she known who had a childhood tragedy? And what good did it ever do to spill your guts about it? “In college. My, uh, my father went to Georgetown for undergraduate, and his roommate’s sister was Deaf, so she was at Gallaudet. So they’d go over and visit her sometimes, and she introduced my dad to my mom, who was in one of her classes.”

Sara imagines young Mr. Grissom: she sees him, his mop of hair, scrawny, maybe a little paler than his son, more old-fashioned, and the future Mrs Grissom, a blue-eyed beauty with that sly smirk that Sara loved so well in her only child. “Did they fall in love right away?”

Grissom leans his head on his palm, his other hand stroking absently at the small dip between Sara’s collarbones. “I think so. They were very serious. Got married soon after graduation. My dad did his PhD at Georgetown, too, and then got hired at UCLA, so they moved out west. I was born a few years later.”

“Did they ever have any trouble?”

Grissom looks at her, his eyes remote. “Not… anything serious, no. My dad’s parents disapproved because my mom was Deaf. Had a lot of backwards beliefs about it. But my dad gave them the proverbial finger and married her anyway.” Grissom hesitates for a moment, chewing on his words. “My mom… my mom always said… that he was like a river. Slow to change course, but once he did, he moved swiftly.”

“Mm,” says Sara, “kind of reminds of this guy I’m seeing.”

He nods, lowering his head to kiss her shoulder. “Not too swiftly, I hope,” he says, not meeting her eye, his voice tight with a fragile humor.

“No,” Sara says. “No, of course not.”

~*~

She’s got him right where she wants him - right on the edge.

Sara has one hand braced on the lip of the bathtub for balance, the other in a loose fist around his stiff penis. Her legs are splayed over his thighs, soap bubbles clinging to her hips and waist, cooling on her stomach. Grissom is splayed out in the tub, arms draped over the rim, head lolling back. He looks relaxed at first glance but he isn’t; there’s a fine tremor in the muscles of his shoulders, his eyelids flickering, his chest rising and falling with uneven breaths. 

“Tell me,” she says, a slow stroke up and down his soap-slick cock, “what did you use to think about?”

He pulls in a shaking breath, and swallows. “Uh, I used to - to think about… about your mouth,” he rasps, his hips drawing up in an involuntary motion, seeking greater friction as she stills her hand on him.

“My mouth,” she echoes, rinsing the soap off his cock and dropping down to crouch over him, her lips brushing the hard bell of his head, slick and wet and pulsing with blood. “What about my mouth?”

She feels his thighs shaking under her arm, and sees he is tensing up all over, right,  _ right  _ on the cusp of orgasm, his balls tightening against his abdomen. “Oh, god. Your - your lips,” he says, “on me - you’d get this look when you were concentrating on something, and you’d lick your lips, and I’d think about - about you licking me.”

“Like this?” she asks, and drags her flattened tongue from the base to tip. 

He shudders all over, arching his hips up towards her open lips. “Yes,” he gasps, “yes, and - taking it into your mouth -”

But she doesn’t, knowing that would finish the game. She licks lightly at his frenulum, the soft, exquisitely sensitive skin that anchors his foreskin to the head of his penis. Grissom makes a strangled moan, bucking up towards her. “Not yet,” she chastises lightly. “Tell me when you’d think about this. At work? Would you get aroused?”

“Yes, yes,” he agrees, sounding a little desperate. “I’d - I’d get hard, watching you at the lab, your hands, your lips, your ass. I’d - you asked me to pin you, and I was so fucking hard, kept getting hard for hours, waiting til I could get home and finish myself off. God, Sara, I’d think about fucking you all the time, I thought about it every  _ day. _ ”

It is a thrill to hear such filthy language from her pocket philosopher; Sara presses her lips against a grin, gripping him at the base, sucking his head into her mouth, working her tongue firmly against that sweet sensitive groove of his frenulum. She takes him all the way into her mouth, the rock-hard head of his penis pressing uncomfortably against the back of her throat. 

“Uh - god,” he grinds out, tensing up, his fingers slipping where he’s gripping the slick tub with no traction. “Oh,  _ oh  _ fuck, I’m gonna come, honey, oh god.”

She pops him out of her mouth, keeping her lips on that tender area of flesh, kissing and licking him up and down as his cock stiffens impossibly further, and his body draws up as rigidly, his legs flexed, and he growls and groans like he’s in serious pain, then his sharp audible breaths,  _ ah ah ah _ . She watches as she works her tongue against him - she watches the first pulse of semen out of the tip, coiling in the bathwater over his stomach, splattering onto his chest; another shot of cum, another, his hips jerking up into her fist, the salty smear of his cum dribbling down into her mouth.

She takes him down slowly, gentle swipes of her tongue until he’s floating boneless, his lungs heaving like bellows, his eyes shut. 

Sara wipes at her lips, draping herself over his body, not caring that there’s this oily puddle of semen on his chest. She rubs her cheek against his cheek. 

“Jesus,” he says, cupping the back of her head, “I can’t even remember the last time I came that hard. I think I was a sophomore.”

She presses little kisses to the water clinging to his beard, kisses his lips, the soft skin under his eye. 

“Mm,” he says, wrapping his arms around her waist. “ ‘Thus with a kiss I die,’ ” he quoted, rather theatrically.

Sara laughed. “Le petit mort, eh?”

“Didn’t feel very petit,” Grissom sighs, forcing his eyes open. 

“Didn’t look very petit,” she agrees, dragging a fingertip through the cum congealing on his stomach. Grissom winces, sitting up and reaching over the tub for a hand towel. He wipes himself off and gently wipes her mouth. 

“Sorry for the mess,” he says softly. He kisses her lips with a featherlight pressure. 

“No,” she says. “That was my mess. I made it.”

He laughs a little. “You certainly caused it, yes.” He grabs the bar of soap and begins trailing it over her hands, up to her elbows, over her shoulders. “You’re so beautiful.” 

He eases her back into the warm water, washing her meticulously, every inch of her soft skin; he drops kisses over the path of the soap bar, and Sara stretches out her arms, leans back her head, calmly receives him as Grissom worships at the altar of her. 

~*~

“Do you ever worry we’ll get sick of each other?”

It’s a valid question, or at least Sara thinks so - they’ve been together every moment, sleeping and waking, for the past week, other than the times that one of them went to the bathroom or Grissom was pulled away by his supervisory duties. 

They were working a string of house burglaries together, wandering the flat quiet streets of suburban Las Vegas, Grissom’s hands in his pockets, Sara idly running her fingers against the toothy bark of the olive trees growing along the sidewalk. Sara hadn’t seen her own apartment in a week and a half. 

Grissom is quiet for a moment, so Sara glances towards her boss. He seems to be working against a frown. “No,” he says. They continue on for a few more steps in silence. “Do you?” he asks, pointedly not looking at her.

Sara sighs inwardly. She had not meant to hurt him or worry him. She was surprised to learn that Grissom was sensitive to rejection, as sensitive as her - more so, in fact. Much more so. It’s a little exhausting, but mostly it makes her feel powerful, makes her feel like she holds his happiness in her hands, as delicate as an eggshell. “I don’t know. What if you get tired of me? You know, the novelty of being with your younger subordinate might wear thin with weeks of 24/7 exposure.”

Grissom swings very slightly to the right, bumping his shoulder against hers. She tries to catch his hand in hers but he keeps them firmly in his pockets. “We both know,” he says softly, “that’s not how these things go.” He glances at her then, a look of bitterness on his face that is almost anger. “It wouldn’t be me getting tired of you, Sara.”

Sara shakes her head but says nothing. She wants to believe what he’s implying is wrong, but she can’t really be sure; all of it feels like a whirlwind, like everything is changing at once. That’s not a surprise, not really; her whole life has been a series of punctuated equilibriums, of sudden and unexpected shifts. But Sara has never been the type to weather the storm, to throw an anchor and ride out the wild waves; she’s always been a drifter, she’s always swum with the current. If Grissom woke up tomorrow and told her to move with him to Cape Cod, to uproot and make a life in Sweden, she would go without question, she would fly with him anywhere. But to promise him this steady unchanging life here in Las Vegas? Sara was not sure even love could keep her so motionless. And was it fair, really, for Grissom to ask a snake not to shed its skin?

“I never actually thought about what this would be like,” Sara admits.

Grissom arches one eyebrow, his gaze skating over her face. He is quiet for a moment, his mouth opening and closing before he forces out the words like they were choking him. “Not quite everything you hoped for, perhaps?” 

His voice is calm, but she senses the terror behind his words, that terror she has known in him as long as she has known him: that crippling, withering horror that he was not, in fact, what she had wanted, that the loved she had promised him was only a vapor, blown away by the wind, where his love was deep roots that could not be touched by the frost, and she sentencing him to a long, lonely life of loving her without hope of her ever loving him in return. It is too big a fear for Sara to touch with her words, so she sets her hand on the back of his neck, rubbing her thumb against his vertebrae. The touch seems to settle him, and she marvels at the power of it, the power of her. She marvels that he wants her to touch him. That, if he is to be believed, he has always wanted it. “I keep thinking you’re going to wake up one day and come to your senses,” she says. “Remember all the reasons why you said no to me so many times for so many years. Why I wasn’t good enough. This is just some temporary insanity. I feel like I’m on borrowed time.”

She hadn’t really known this was the truth of the matter until she said it, and now she feels herself shaking all over with the fear and sadness of it. Grissom stops walking, pulling on her hand until she steps closer. “I can tell you that’s not going to happen, and it won’t,” he says softly, “but you won’t believe it until you have evidence to support the conclusion. So just keep watching, Sara. Keep collecting evidence. It’ll all point the same way. I want… I want to spend the rest of my life proving to you that you’re my whole heart.”

“The rest of your life?” Sara echoes lightly, unable to stop the tremor in her voice. “Those are serious words, Gris.”

Grissom nods. And he  _ looks  _ serious, staring at her, the love in his eyes so dark and deep it almost seems like heartbreak. 

~*~

_ Sara, Sara, Sara,  _ reads the letter,  _ Sara, your namesake, born Sarai, was an old goddess of the desert; she lived to one hundred and twenty seven years, if the Book is to be believed. She was wise and mighty and selfish, jealously striking her slave who she forced to bear a son for her. Many of the mightest women are that way.  _

_ I lay at night and fill my mind with you, as if in a waking dream, my daughter. Abimelech tried to touch pure, pious Sara, but God would not let him, sending plagues and nightmares to keep him away. I think I am Abimelech, Sara, and I fear I shall never touch you again. I wish you could remember your time inside my belly. You were sweeter than a summer peach, and I remember your tiny feet pressing out against the walls of me. I longed to touch you then, too.  _

_ You tell me you’ve moved to live in the desert, just like that old witch Sarai. Have you found your Abraham? Is he dragging you from temple to temple, gathering riches? Have you already born your prophet? Am I a grandmother? When you were born, your father wept as he held you, all covered in blood and fluids. It was the only moment I ever believed he had a heart. He could give you what he never gave me. I’m not sure I ever forgave you for that.  _

_ I’m trying to forgive you now, Sara.  _

_ Write to me, please. I want to read your words and see what little shapes your fingers create on the page. Tell about the desert, and your Abraham.  _

_ Your loving mother. _

~*~

She reads the letters after the sun sets, in the cooling dark of their bedroom. His bedroom, really, but she hasn’t been in her bedroom more than three days this month. He wants her with him always, always, and she wants to be wanted by him. 

He sleeps next to her, snuffling a little. He doesn’t seem to notice that she’d turned on the bedside lamp. She hasn’t read the letters in years - she’s stowed them all in a shoebox in her closet. She brought the shoebox here and hid it under his bed like a child might hide a stolen toy. She wasn’t sure she’d open them, but somehow she feels suddenly that she must; she feels like Grissom is a wall at her back, Grissom is solid ground beneath her feet, Grissom’s are the arms that will hold her upright, strong enough to take her full weight. So she opens the letters and she reads them all.

Her weeping wakes him; he looks over her shoulder, sees the spidery scrawl, reads only a few lines as he eases her back into his warm body. He says nothing. There are no quotes for this.

She falls asleep in his arms and wakes in them, the sheafs of paper all around her, loose and layered like the fallen petals of a dying flower. 

Sara rests her hands on Grissom’s cheek. 

_ My Abraham,  _ she thinks,  _ and I will follow him anywhere.  _

~*~

“So,” she says as they step together into his townhouse, “what do you want to do today?”

He twitches a little at her question, his serious, unsmiling face turning towards hers so he can search her eyes. “Uh,” he replies. 

Sara rolls her eyes. “Have sex. Yes, I figured. But I mean, what else? Grab some breakfast, maybe? Go for a walk?” She flaps her hands a little, frustrated. “You know. Stuff. Activities.” Sara pauses, cocking her head at her boss. “Dates?”

“Right,” he says, folding his hands together over and over like he’s washing them in a sink, a mounting anxiety drawing his shoulders up towards his ears. “Right. Uh, yeah. Of course. What - uh - did you have something in mind?”

Sara stares at her boss for a moment, her brain reeling slightly as she transitions from the man she had been speaking to only twenty minutes earlier - he’d been advising her and Warrick somberly on how slim their chances of conviction really were, and speaking poetically about the inconstancy of the justice system - to the man before her, nervous, starting to blush above his scruffy beard, looking at her like she’s just asked him how he’s taking her to prom when he doesn’t have a car. How can he be so wise and so boyish? How can this person who is now shifting from foot to foot in his kitchen be the same person who remains so calm and logical during even the most horrific crises?

She pulls off her shoes, flinging out one arm to keep her balance, and then hops over in her mismatched socks to give him a reassuring kiss. “Gris,” she says low, like they might be overheard, “you’re not in trouble.”

“I’m not,” he echoes, almost asking.

“No.”

He exhales without sound, his shoulders dropping back to their natural position. Grissom presses his mouth thoughtfully, raising one hand to play with her necklace. “You’re right, though. We should do… things. I’m not… so good at thinking of things.”

Sara rubs her hand over his hair, a little stiff from the gel he uses to keep it from getting unruly during the day. She touches the shells of his ears, then scratches his beard. Just because she can. “We can think of things together. Like… we could go on a hike. Or a picnic. Or if there’s some place one of us wants to visit.”

“Those all sound lovely,” Grissom says placidly, still fiddling with her necklace. “Why don’t I take you to breakfast today and then you can pick what we do after?”

After all her talk of activities and plans, Sara decides that she wants to go back to his townhouse and hang out, maybe play a boardgame. Grissom glows at her - that’s really the only way she can think to describe it, how he looks at her: not quite smiling, with this kind of warm radiation of feeling that is unlike anything else. They settle on playing poker, given Grissom’s prior affinity; she realizes immediately that she is severely outmatched - she has no poker face at all - but she realizes also that she can read Grissom in a way he isn’t used to, and he’s blinking rapidly as she calls his bluff. 

“You’ve got nothing,” she laughs, going all in, pushing her handful of Skittles into the pot. 

He stares at her, completely impassive, but what she can’t see in his face she can feel in his eyes. “Are you sure about that?” he asks softly.

Sara grins. “Positive.”

She’s right: he loses. Sara is so delighted she pushes aside the cards and pushes her man back into his couch, her lips to his lips, her palms on the sides of his face, devouring. 

“I love you so fucking much,” she mumbles into the hairs curling on his temple, desperately honest.

Grissom’s arm is around her waist, his other hand gripping the back of her neck. “Because I let you beat me at poker?”

She recoils. “Wait - what?  _ Let  _ me beat you? That’s bullshit! I won fair and…” Sara cuts herself off, seeing Grissom’s face.

He’s working hard against a smile, staring up at her with glittering eyes, and then he’s got her by the waist and she’s pressed backwards into the couch cushions. “Well I’m glad you can’t tell anybody,” he says, dropping his voice to its lower registers as he envelopes her, “or my reputation might be in serious danger.”

Sara rakes her fingers through his hair, studying his face, his blue eyes crinkled with happiness, the twist of his mouth that tries not to be a smile. “God, Gris,” she says, the pad of her thumb dragging along the soft hairs of his eyebrow, “this is worth it, all those years of waiting, of you stringing me along. It’s totally worth it. Being with you. It’d be worth waiting a thousand years.”

Grissom draws in a slow breath against her, his expression now serious, though no less intent. “I am sorry, Sara,” he says.

“Why did we wait?”

He leans his forehead against hers, and his breath warms the shell of her lips. “ ‘You can’t give your heart to a wild thing.’ ”

Sara frowns, pulling away, sitting up. Affronted. Offended. “I’m a  _ wild thing _ ? What is that quote from anyway?”

Grissom levers himself sideways, sprawled at angle on the couch, his eyes half closed, like the energy it was taking him to discuss this was too great, like it was draining the very life from him. “Truman Capote.” Grissom creaks up an eyelid to peer at her. “Maybe not the one to take advice from. Still. It was - it was a risk assessment, Sara. I’m a poker player. I calculate my odds. It seemed impossible to me that you’d ever really settle for a middle aged, unsocialized workaholic. Fussy, arrogant, stubborn. I know what I am. So instead you’d spend a few weeks or a few months or, god willing, a few years, and then you’d realize it was a bad bargain and you’d move on. And you’d be right to. I wouldn’t blame you. But in that time together you would’ve shown me a life, a full life. I knew that as soon as I realized I was in love with you. That you would show me a happiness I didn’t know existed. And I’d lose it when I lost you, and I’d never get it back. I’d be the same lonely eccentric I was before, but now I’d know what I didn’t have, and I’d miss it - I’d miss you - for the rest of my life. The price…  _ that  _ price… didn’t seem worth it. Too much.”

Sara feels his words flaying at her, peeling her skin back like a ripe fruit. She is remade through his eyes: a wild thing, indeed; a blazing fire, and he’d be drawn to the warmth but scalded by the flame; a blooming flower that, when plucked by his fingers, can only wither. “What changed?”

Grissom rolls his head to look at her, drowsy, and she’d think he was quite at peace if it wasn’t for the shuddering sorrow in his calm eyes. “Nothing. I just changed my assessment. You are worth it. Any time with you. However much time you want. It’s worth it.”

Sara shakes her head, swiping impatiently at the tears in her eyes. “Forever,” she says, angrily, aggressively. “I want forever, forever, forever.”

It’s a chant, or maybe a prayer. And it’s true: it is what she wants. It’s true, but it can’t be a promise; not with his eyes, tightening with that old, old sadness, that sadness that’s been with him longer than she’s been alive, that sadness that counts their every day together, their every minute, that sadness which knows without having to know that she will leave him, someday or another; that sadness which understands that  _ forevers  _ live only in the dreams of the broken-hearted.

~*~

Sara collects the evidence of the crime after it has already occurred: of course, of course. This one of the natural logics of the universe.

It’s Nick who has the whip, brushing over with rubber-gloved fingers like he’s handling a precious instrument, a Stravinski. “She was whipping the killer to death,” he says, hushed, worshipful, a secret he is amazed to know. “Grissom found her just in time.”

It’s Catherine who describes the woman, beautiful, a towering fury of pale skin and kohl-dark eyes, black tears snaking down her face, blood red lips smeared with her howling cries. Like a goddess, cursed to earth; she is the greatest of these. And Grissom, her savior, her only possible savior, who is a cool running river, who had, against all natural logics of the universe, changed the course of his flow to find her.

It’s Warrick who reviews the crime scene photos, the horrific carnage, the daughter whose flesh was rotted in the pits of hell, Persephone; and Heather, Demeter, willing to deal with the devil himself, ready to exact revenge. “She’s something else,” Warrick says, awestruck, as one is of the gods; and then smiling, turning to Sara, “but then again, so is Grissom,” as though Sara might agree, as though there could be no plainer statement of fact.

It’s Brass who releases Heather from the station, grumbling to Sara that it was only as a favor to Grissom, a favor to a very dear friend. “He brought her into the station in his arms like she was a princess he rescued from a dragon,” Brass snaps and sizzles like overcooked bacon, “and she just expects everybody to fall at her feet like he does.” But Brass didn’t, or wouldn’t, or maybe even couldn’t; but Heather’s still worked under his skin like a splinter, and he curses her, he shakes his fist at the sky, crying out, it seems to Sara, at the injustice of the gods.

It’s Grissom who finds Sara, apparently a talent of his, locating women who’d rather he’d stay away - she’s at her apartment, curled into her couch, prepared to ride the wild waves of heartbreak as she’s always done: alone. But he’s opening the door with the key she forgot she gave him, and he is, for once, talking too much, pulling off his shoes, saying, “Sara, oh, god, I’m hungry,” and peeling off his jacket, not even looking at her, “I didn’t know you were coming here this morning - it’s fine, I like staying here with you - what do you want to eat? God, I need a shower,” and rustling his hair to demonstrate, a trail of desert sand following him as he stumbles across her neatly ordered living room, dropping his jacket onto her coffee table and spilling her water, tracking dirt over her recently vacuumed carpet, smelling like sweat and sadness. “I don’t even know how to tell you about this case,” he continues, pulling off his shirt and letting it fall over her Tiffany lampshade, “so I won’t even try.” He collapses next to her on the couch, and then he slumps over sideways until his upper body is in her lap, never having looked at her face, never having bothered; trusting, she supposes, that he would see only warmth there, only kindness and love and welcome.

Was he wrong to trust?

Sara touches his filthy, sandy, wonderful hair, traces the shell of his ear. He closes his eyes. “I don’t even think I can shower,” he sighs, taking her hand and kissing the palm of it, pressing it over his eyes like it’s a cool rag on a fevered forehead, pulling it down so her fingers are over his lips as he speaks like she can hold his words in her hands, “is it okay if I just stay here for a while?”

He opens his eyes and he finally, finally looks at her, and Sara looks at him, filthy, exhausted, red-eyed, her soldier returned from the war; Heather’s shining knight, less shiny with the armor all stripped away, only Sara’s bone-weary man who was once just a boy, who loves not only Sara, perhaps, but trusts her love in a way, she knows, that he trusts nobody else’s. Sara’s not a goddess, she’s only a woman who was once a girl, but it’s only her arms that he falls into, though perhaps not only her that he takes into his arms. 

“Gris,” she says, touching his soft eyelids, the creases that line his forehead, “you can stay here as long as you need.”

He sighs like she has just welcomed him to paradise. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They're finally together!!! Oh jeez. That took way too long.


	9. Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Grissom's POV, a short bridge between seasons 6 & 7.

~*~

Grissom examined himself inquisitively in his bathroom mirror. His face had thinned out a little, and he contemplated the possibility of removing his beard.

He had lost some weight. He knew this because A) his pants were fitting loosely and B) Nick had said to him, “loving the svelte figure, boss,” last Tuesday. Grissom had been appalled, naturally. Nick had swiftly realized his error and vacated the materials analysis lab. 

The cause of his newly  _ svelte figure  _ was no mystery. Sara fed him lots of vegetables. Lots and  _ lots  _ of vegetables. They were good - sort of - well, they were fine. He loved her. They were fine. Sara also brought him on hikes. Lots of hikes. “For the dog,” she would say to him, and he would look into her wide, hopeful brown eyes, and then look down into the dog’s wide, hopeful brown eyes. “He needs to be exercised.” On the hikes Sara and Hank would stride confidently up ahead while Grissom trailed after them, squinting in his sun hat and poking with sticks at ant colonies, wondering if it was the dog being exercised… or him. 

The dog had been her idea. Well, not only hers, of course. Not that she really said anything. His neighbor had bought the dog for protection. This was moderately hilarious to Grissom. The dog was about as protective as a newborn lamb. But he was large, so Grissom supposed he saw the logic. His neighbor, a woman who was eight five years old if she was a day, had then injured her back. Could no longer walk or manage the dog. “I’ll drop him at the pound, I suppose,” she’d said, her eyes watery with tears. Grissom had shrugged, head tilted. Wondered if he should say, “I’m sorry for your loss,” or if that phrase only applied to families of murder victims.

Sara had touched his elbow.

A meaningful look. A  _ meaningful  _ look. 

“Oh,” said Grissom, and then glanced at his neighbor, and then glanced at his townhouse door. “Oh.”

So now he had a dog. And a svelte figure.

Grissom leaned forward, his hips resting against the lip of his bathroom counter. Tilted his chin back. He tugged a single wiry whisker with his fingertips. It might be time, he thought. It might be time. 

He had been weighing the possibility of shaving his beard for six or seven months now. It had been seven months ago precisely when Sara had said in passing that sometimes his mustache hairs tickled her nostrils when he kissed her. Grissom had taken this observation seriously. He could not imagine enduring such a sensory intrusion while being kissed. He felt very honored that she had suffered through it so regularly in order to be intimate with him. For a while after her having said this, Grissom had avoided kissing her out of respect. But after a couple of weeks Sara had cornered him against the SUV when packing up from a crime scene and made a thorough inspection of his mouth with her tongue, and Grissom decided that she must have come to terms with the mustache hairs in her nostrils. He was glad; he very much enjoyed kissing her. To be safe, he left it to her to initiate.

So perhaps it was time to shed the beard, and spare her from bristly hairs up the nose. 

“Hey!”

It was Sara, clattering through the front door. She always made a bit of a noisy entrance, keys jangling on the side table, shoes clopping onto the floor, a mess of long limbs and hair frizzing into her eyes and her hollering voice and usually tripping over a wire or knocking over a briefcase. Her clumsiness was one of Grissom’s favorite things about her. Watching her stumble and careen through his space made the air feel electric, like she had infused a life into his home that hadn’t been there before. Like she was defibrillating his very existence.

“I’m back here,” he said. He heard the skate of Hank’s claws correcting his over-enthusiastic left turn as the dog bounded down the hallway towards the bathroom.  _ Incoming _ , Grissom thought. 

The dog rounded the corner, shouldering open the door. His wriggling, joyful body hipped and hopped all around Grissom’s unmoving feet.

“Hey there,” Grissom greeted, reaching down to scratch behind Hank’s ear. The dog accepted this welcome and then moved on to insert his large square head into the toilet bowl. The slapping sounds of his tongue in the toilet water echoed through the bathroom.

Sara appeared in the doorway. “What is it with the toilet water?” she said, crossing her arms and frowning like Hank was a suspect in a murder investigation.

Grissom glanced between his housemates. “Maybe he likes the freshness. Or he can smell us in there.”

Sara looked faintly nauseated. Grissom shrugged. “What are you doing in here?” she asked instead.

Grissom glanced at his reflection.  _ Hello old man,  _ he thought. “You may have noticed I haven’t kissed you as often lately.”

Sara’s frown deepened. “Um,” she said, pivoting backwards a half-step. “I - I guess. Yeah, sort of. Why? What does that have to do with the bathroom? Is this about - I mean, I’ve been staying here a lot lately. I know that. I can get my stuff out of here, if that’s what you’re asking. And we can take some space from each other.”

Grissom broke away from staring at his own reflection - oddly hypnotizing - to regard Sara for a moment. The seven or eight sentences she’d just spoken floated in his mind, disjointed, and Grissom took a moment to parse them through.  _ Staying here a lot lately - get my stuff out of here - we can take some space.  _ She was implying, it seemed, that they’d been spending too much time together. This was an extremely worrying statement. Grissom did not think they’d been spending too much time together. In fact, Grissom was rather partial to the idea that they  _ could not _ spend too much time together; that any time there was to spend, he’d like to spend together. Grissom studied Sara’s expression for a moment. She looked hurt. Maybe she believed that he didn’t want to spend time with her? This would be very surprising, given that he made every attempt to secure their spending as much time together as possible. 

It was all a little confusing.

“You said my mustache hairs go up your nose,” Grissom tried.

Sara stared at Grissom without speaking for several seconds. At least fifteen, less than thirty. She was still frowning. “I’m sorry,” she said, “what?”

“You said--”

“I heard you,” she said, holding up her hand. “Did I - when did I say that?”

“About seven months ago.”

“Seven months ago I said your mustache hairs go up my nose. Sometimes. When you kiss me.” Sara said all this, not as a question, but as though speaking aloud the clues to a puzzle. He saw the gears of her thoughts whirring behind her narrowed eyes. “And so - what? You stopped kissing me? And now you want me to move my stuff out of the bathroom?”

Grissom looked over at his bathroom countertop. She did have a lot of stuff in here - shaving cream for her legs, a few deodorant sticks, toothbrush, hairbrush, another hairbrush, face wash, moisturizers for her face, for her hands, for her legs, tubes of make up, little pencils for her eyes, little tiny brushes for her eyelashes, about a million and a half hair bands tucked into random crevices where she’d never find them again. It was a cluttered mess. “Um, maybe organize it a little,” Grissom allowed. “I don’t know where else you’d store it, though, if it wasn’t in the bathroom.”

Sara picked up her tube of shaving cream, glared at it, and set it back down. “Okay.”

“The reason I mention the kissing,” Grissom said, to summarize, “is because I’m thinking of shaving the beard. So it doesn’t go up your nose anymore.” 

“Oh,” said Sara, then,  _ “oh _ .” She grinned: a sudden, scorching loveliness that made Grissom’s eyes burn a little to look at. She stepped up and placed her hands on his cheeks. “That’s so thoughtful.”

Grissom straightened a little, pleased. He leaned into her hands. 

“So you don’t want me to move my things out of the bathroom?”

Grissom shook his head. “I like having all your things here.” He leaned over and picked up her face moisturizer, studying it for a moment. “When I come in here, I see all your things. Everywhere I go in the house, I see little reminders of you. It makes me feel like you’re always here with me, even when you’re not physically here.” Sara’s eyes were looking a little misty. Grissom hurried on. “You can spend as much time here or bring as many things over as you want. You could just live here, if you want. We don’t need that other apartment.” 

Sara stared at him. Her expression was very blank.

Grissom motioned illustratively to the closet a few feet behind them in the hallway. “I have extra space, you know. To store stuff. Plenty of room. And the dog can’t go over to your place, so. It does make sense when you think about it.” She was still saying nothing; Grissom felt a sweat break out along his hairline. “If you want.”

Silence. Silence. And then: “You’re asking me to move in with you?”

_ Am I?  _ Grissom thought wonderingly.  _ Is this… a thing? An important thing? One of those universally known and understood relationships Things that she would expect him to understand and which he, obviously, did not? Another example of his emotional immaturity and remarkable deficiency of romantic experience?  _ “If you want,” Grissom said, his voice a little hoarse.

Sara stepped up closer. She was touching his neck now, her hands cupped loosely against his throat, her thumbs making soothing circles over his pulse points. Sara inspected his face like it was a sample for her microscope. “It’s kind of a big deal to ask a girl to move in with you,” she said calmly.

“Oh,” said Grissom. “How so?”

Sara shrugged one shoulder. Somehow the gesture did not at all convey the casualness it was intended to. “A step before marriage.”

“Ah,” said Grissom, with understanding. Relief suffused his body. He settled his hands on her hips and kissed her, careful not to push his mustache hairs up her nose. “Well, sure,” he went on, “that makes sense. So, yes, if you’d like: I’m asking you to move in with me.” He shrugged, also in a very serious manner. “Only if you want to, Sara.”

“I do want to,” she said. Grissom was struck by the strong, disorienting sense that she could only say yes. That it was impossible, somehow, for her to refuse him. It felt all at once like a very important moment. 

_ She’s mine,  _ he thought, and the thought was as heavy as a gold bar in his mind, solid, powerful, not easily moved or knocked aside.  _ She’s mine. She’s always been mine.  _

“Good,” he said, hushed, reverent. He thought of her, that long wild mess of a woman he’d met so many years ago; thought of her, feverish and grouchy as he pressed his hand to her forehead five or six years ago; thought of her, blazing and defiant as he pulled her back a moment away from attacking a suspect. “Sara,” Grissom attempted, “you’re my…” He trailed off, his mind spinning and groping for a word, for any word that might begin to capture the enormity of what was inside him, of the love that soaked his every pore. He shook his head mutely. 

Sara gave him a moment to complete his thought, but seeing that he would not, she nodded. “I know,” she said. 

She probably did know. Still, he wished there were some way he could say it. 

~*~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just something my brain was whirring on. Still trying to figure out what to flesh out for season 7 - seems like there's so much there that could be said!


End file.
